The Container (oil pastel)
The container was not built to hold love. It was built so love could survive relocation.
Love does not die when repair is not offered. It migrates.
This is not love’s failure. This is love preserving its integrity.
Love’s integrity means it does not remain where it cannot continue to dwell. It does not diminish itself to survive in the absence of mutual care. It returns to the one who is willing and able to carry it forward without distortion.
Repair is what allows love to continue to dwell between two people. Repair restores continuity after rupture.
But repair cannot occur unilaterally. It requires willingness from both people to protect what has been built.
When repair is refused, whether through absence, neglect, denial, shame intolerance, or the inability to turn toward what has been disrupted, love does not disappear. Shame intolerance makes repair impossible because repair requires the capacity to remain present while acknowledging harm.
I learned this not as theory, but as fact, sitting inside a silence that would not turn back toward me.
When that capacity is not available, love preserves itself by relocating to where it can continue to dwell.
What once revealed us from outside becomes what sustains us from within as structure.
What love built between us revealed what love was always building within me.
Dedicated
To those who have loved deeply enough to be reorganized by love.
To those who have built something sacred and discovered they, too, were being built.
To those who have known despair and lived long enough to feel it soften into structure.
To those learning that love does not leave us, but teaches us how to dwell.
Love Begins Outside Us
Love always begins outside us, because at first we can only recognize it when we encounter it reflected back through another person.
This is the function of mirroring.
We do not discover ourselves in isolation. We discover ourselves in reflection. Another person’s presence becomes the surface through which something previously unseen within us becomes visible. They do not create what we see. They reveal it.
As Barbara Kessler writes in her song Grown-Up Love Songs and Other Oxymorons:
“There is a part of me only you know. Will you show it to me?”
This is the vulnerability and the promise of mirroring. Another person does not give us something new. They reveal something that could not be seen without them.
The mirror is not where the self is created. It is where the self becomes visible to itself.
This is why Torah as Mirror has never been metaphor alone. Torah reflects back to us what has always existed within us but had not yet become visible to our own awareness. Relationship does the same. Love does the same.
At first, love feels like something outside us.
Without deciding to, we begin reorganizing ourselves around it. Our attention rearranges itself. We invest care where previously there had only been function. Continuity begins quietly and unmistakably to form.
This is how love builds us.
Not all at once, and not by force, but through steady devotion, until what once felt provisional begins to feel like dwelling.
Only later do we discover that what love built within us was never dependent on its remaining outside us.
In Kabbalah, this expansive movement is called Chesed, lovingkindness, the force that draws us toward connection and belonging.
But Chesed alone cannot sustain dwelling.
Because love that expands without structure cannot remain.
Every encounter with love reveals light. But only a vessel allows that light to remain.
And when the mirror disappears, something disorienting happens.
You reach for the person to tell them something small, something only they would understand. And there is nowhere for the sentence to go.
The sentence still forms. It simply has nowhere left to land.
The question is no longer only where did love go.
The question becomes: where am I?
This is grief.
Grief is the nervous system learning to house what no longer has an external home.
Grief is the interval between external continuity and internal continuity.
Love does not vanish when mirroring is lost.
It becomes structure.
As Barbara Kessler writes in her song Forever Haunted:
“To the one I once loved
There’s your anger.
Here’s my need.
In the crack between still grows the seed of love.”
The crack is not where love ends. It is where love relocates.
What was once sustained through mutual presence begins, gradually, to sustain itself from within.
What was once experienced as reflection becomes identity.
What was once experienced as dwelling between two beings becomes dwelling within one.
Oneness
Shema teaches that God is Echad, indivisible.
At first, love is learned between nervous systems. We learn continuity through resonance, through being seen and mirrored. But what is real cannot remain dependent on external reflection in order to remain real.
When love migrates inward, it is not shrinking. It is returning to oneness.
This is sovereignty.
Sovereignty is the completion of internalization. What was once sustained between two people becomes capable of sustaining itself within one.
Sovereignty is when love no longer depends on reciprocity in order to remain alive within you, because it has become structure.
When I am upstairs in my office working with clients, one of my core teachings is that we are working to strengthen our vessel to receive more light so that we can give it away. Because when we have love in our hearts, we do not need to hold onto it with our hands.
This is the moment when love stops being only resonance and becomes embodiment.
The Mishkan: Love Made Structural
This is why Torah introduces the Mishkan at this precise moment.
The Mishkan means dwelling place. It is not love itself, but the structure built so that presence can remain continuously, rather than appearing only in moments of overwhelming intensity and then receding.
Before the Mishkan, the people encountered presence in flashes, revelation powerful enough to reorganize them, but not yet in a form they could sustain.
What happens next is quiet, but irreversible.
When love becomes structure within you, you are no longer organized around whether it will remain. You are organized around your capacity to carry it.
Love is no longer something you must secure in order to feel continuous. Continuity is already present.
From this place, you do not turn toward another person in order to recover yourself. You turn toward them as someone who has already arrived.
Connection becomes expansion rather than stabilization.
Repair becomes mutual rather than unilateral.
Love becomes choice rather than necessity.
You are no longer asking another person to hold what you cannot hold alone. You are meeting them as someone who has become capable of dwelling.
Not the absence of love.
But the freedom to love without losing the structure that sustains you.
The Mishkan transforms revelation into continuity.
The Mishkan was never only something they built.
It was something they were becoming.
Because a dwelling can be constructed outside us.
But someone must become capable of inhabiting that dwelling within.
Disability wisdom has always understood this. When external structures cannot reliably hold us, the psyche develops internal architecture capable of sustaining continuity.
I recognize now that much of my life has been shaped by this same movement, the instinct to build structures capable of holding love so that it would not disappear as suddenly as it had arrived. I lifted details carefully. I devoted myself to creating spaces and relationships that could sustain presence across time, trusting that love deserved structure, that love deserved continuity, that love deserved a dwelling place.
I did not yet understand that in building these dwellings, I was also building the structure that would one day allow love to remain within me.
Where Love Became Consecrated
There was an evening, not long after everything had changed, when I sat at my table surrounded by people I cared about.
My mind understood what had ended.
But my nervous system was still reorganizing.
The structure that had held continuity in my daily life was gone.
But the pathways remained.
Love was still present.
And I spoke about it.
Not because I wished to expose what was sacred, but because I had not yet fully become its sole dwelling place. The love that had reorganized me was still completing its migration inward.
Nothing I said was untrue.
But truth spoken while integration is still underway carries the energy of transition rather than the steadiness of dwelling.
Later that evening, as I read blessings, I reached the word despair and found myself unable to continue.
Because despair, in its deepest sense, is not the absence of love.
It is what the psyche experiences when love has reorganized us so completely that its previous structure can no longer contain it.
The breaking of the vessel does not destroy the light. It reveals where the vessel must now be formed within.
Nothing had returned. Nothing had been repaired.
And yet something in me was no longer waiting.
This was the moment I understood that love had not abandoned me. It had trusted me enough to remain.
What I was experiencing was not destruction.
It was consecration.
Consecration is the moment when something that once existed between two people becomes integrated into the structure of the self.
The dwelling had not disappeared.
It had relocated.
I was becoming its dwelling place.
Love Arrives Within
Love always begins outside us.
But it does not remain there.
It was always teaching us how to become its dwelling place.
Nothing that has truly reorganized you can be undone.
I am no longer searching for the dwelling. I am living inside what remained.
What once required another person’s presence has become my own continuity.
And once it dwells within you, it no longer depends on anyone’s return in order to remain alive.
What the Dwelling Makes Possible
When you become the dwelling, love no longer determines whether you remain whole.
You turn toward another as someone who has already arrived.
From this place, repair becomes possible in a new way.
Not as the restoration of something fragile.
But as the meeting of two structures capable of continuity.
Love no longer needs to hold you together.
It becomes something you are capable of holding together, with another, without losing yourself.
This is the promise of the Mishkan.
Not that love will never leave.
But that once you have become its dwelling, you will never again be without a place for it to live.
Blessing
May you trust the love that has reorganized you, even while its structure is still forming.
May you forgive yourself for the moments when integration was still underway.
May remorse restore alignment.
May forgiveness restore continuity.
May you discover that grief is evidence of love’s depth.
May you discover that you remain.
May you discover that what remains is capable of sustaining love.
I see you.
The dwelling is no longer something you seek. It is something you are.
I bless you.
Shabbat shalom.
Love, Jenny