Into the Lemniscate
Tis the season of hearts and flowers, chocolates, jewelry, and frilly cards professing poetry and languages of love. If this is your unfolding chapter, enjoy this joy. For some, this season is more lonely than lovely. For every one of us, love is much more than the hallmarky offerings this mid-month brings. Love is a verb, and we get to practice it all kinds of ways.
For consideration, in the history of symbols for love: the lemniscate. It’s really a mathematical symbol, born of the Latin term meaning ‘decorated with ribbons’, we know it better as the sideways-8 indicating ‘infinity’. Tattoo artists have myriad designs featuring this loop, and it also is common in geometry, in Celtic knots, and in First Nations traditions, and in graphic design. On camera settings, it indicates focal length is set to the infinite distance. In livestock branding, it’s called a ‘lazy eight’. For most of us, it just looks like what it is supposed to mean: never-ending.
Along the way, we hopefully have discovered love is enormous. Love unfurls both slowly, and all at once — as in love for new babies with all the promise of everything good. In case a refresher is needed, Aristotle defined the four types of love: philia (friendship), agape (love for others), storge (familial love — see above, re: babies), and eros (passion). Beyond those basics, we can have ludus (playful love), pragma (longstanding love), philautia (self-love), and if it’s too much we get mania (obsessive love). Depending who you ask, the opposite of love is indifference, or fear (which is why philiophobia is the fear of being beloved). It is actually no wonder the infinity symbol, the lemniscate, is often associated with unending love. I’ll tell you why that’s so: because love, in every form, is impossible to define, doubles back on itself, reinvents, is both old and new, and is terribly personal and complex.
In a true lemniscate, both sides of the symbol are exactly equal, and meet in the middle. It’s a beautiful thing in mathematics, and almost impossible to create in reality. In reality, we are mostly unbalanced, often take more than we give, rarely meet in the middle, and have social and emotional hierarchies that undermine our sense of equality — even to ourselves. Without getting all bogged down, this symbol indicates potential infinity, not actual infinity…and that is kind of promising in itself. It’s a strong maybe. And some days, that is the level best we can hope for.
Here’s a truth: possibilities get us up in the morning. All kinds of love makes all kinds of things possible. We even surprise ourselves with the depth and width and scope of how our possible loves unfold. Love can look like ‘text me when you’re home’, ‘I made this for you’, good-morning-texts, ‘I brought you coffee’, memes and emojis and music and book reviews shared. Love is showing up, being greeted by name. Love is the quiet ‘yes’. Love keeps the nose-prints on the patio door and car windows even after your sweet dog is months gone. Love even makes Kermit the Frog’s ‘Rainbow Connection’ for ‘the lovers, the dreamers, and me’ plausible, or Johnny Cash’s never getting over those blue eyes. We can miss our people we just saw this morning, or last month, or who have left this earth decades ago — with every miss announcing itself to us. Love makes us believe: in the first crocus popping through the snow, in the sunrise, the tides, the Blues, in the arc of the moral universe, in justice, in peace, in what’s next, in more, and in that dog sleeping in a spot of sunshine. Believing in ourselves is step one: we are worthy. Love yourself, mean it.
Quick aside: my late uncle Rick married into the family deep into the second half of his life, after decades of bachelorhood and austere living. He was immediately immersed in step-dadding to teens, in an extended family of young adults and young marrieds and young grand-nephews and grand-neices, and then grandchildren. At the end of his life, my cousin asked him how he managed to be always calm; the answer: I try to choose the most loving path. No, not the easiest or fastest —but the path that will allow a relationship to grow. And it is work (capital W) to be a peacemaker, to listen, to smooth and to soothe. What we all learned from him was to pour into yourself so you can be that person for another. Surprise: we are the center dot on our own lemniscate. Everything sends out and returns from us, so we have to figure it out. We need to take time so we can make time, nourish so we can feed. That means being a valentine to yourself….so, yes, have the good coffee, listen to more music, write rough drafts, bake from scratch, text your people you’re thinking of them. Send it out. It will return.
Love is a wingspan. It takes some bravery to open wide, to take chances, to embrace what we cannot see. And like a lemniscate, we wrap back around ourselves and draw in close what gives us purpose and resolve, intention and fulfillment. Think of the lemniscate not as ‘forever’, but as ‘limitless’. The way we love others, and the world, depends first on our philautia: do we believe in ourselves enough to be unlimited? When we are bold, and lead with heart, that is how we flex and grow, and find more to love. The truth is, we all have pain, we all have sorrow, and sometimes our lemniscate is out of whack and uneven. Righting it back often needs a rally squad of people who love us back, our philia, in storge and with agape, and maybe even with passion, too. It all overlaps, like a mobius ribbon, bending and flexing to the heartbeats inside.
We are large, we contain multitudes — so here’s to us. To infinity, and beyond.
