Journaling last night, I explored a sneaking fear that "love," as I held it, between two people, does not even exist. This is how it went (the abbreviated version):
Is our "loving" of one another actually only the shape and intensity of our own needs being experienced in the universe, some exquisite harmonic tone that sends us reeling? Is unrequited love a felt intense longing attached to an unmet need, the catharsis of empathic resonance nearly at hand?
I had some fear here; what if there is no love? What would that mean to me? Is the only true love what we experience within ourselves?
If this is so, we only feel our own jubilant vibrations of needs met, more apparent as they resonate with the attentions of another. We hold ourselves through the ecstatic caring of one another. But why, oh why, is it so unnatural seeming to shower this affection, this love, on ourselves in the first place?
Are we designed with this reflective dimension (loving one another) in order to survive as a species -- all of us organs, cells, to the body of our people, of creation? Why is the greater whole so important? Why not just create one person who is self-sufficient in all of his/her needs?
Such a solution would be apparently static. As a whole, we can achieve a balance that appears this quiet from the outside in our individual or collective consciousness. Is the dynamic that we move through in order to find equilibrium as great a truth as the balancing point itself? Is the drive to evolve in consciousness as we dance toward equilibrium in the moment what this is all about -- learning to love, make peace and beauty?
Is evolution the life force itself, a living love? If so, how can I best let go of the "here" and "there" I like to mark -- that human charting of the beginnnings and ends of paths that suggests that evolution is a hierarchy in which we better ourselves?
What if our spiritual evolution, reflective of our physical evolution, is only about getting "here" in a state more adapted, alive, and awake? Becoming as Being. Sinking into what Is.
If so, then love is an Awakening of all creation as a whole. Not a feeling limited to our singular reflective experience with one another. Not a feeling flowing from and to ourselves, reflecting only within. It's not about loving oneself or loving one another. It's about loving, just loving, without the notion of boundaries or celebrations of the exclusivity of loving me or loving you.
It's the embrace of the living, a loving in being, in all for all.
I include such serious play in my blog because it is as real in my life as the laundry, the garden, the food I eat. Integrated. I would so love to hear from you all -- is this something you've explored recently? Do you have a different angle on it? Disagree with parts? Find it boring or too heady? Your comments bring my posts to life for me. Would you leave one?
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5 comments:
It's so hard, isn't it, to find someone with the courage to lay down words in the ether? A big question, begging for feedback. I know I love it when people comment, even just a snippet.
As for the question, I haven't delved that deeply for awhile. My focus is too self-centered right now, concentrated on the need simply to discover who I am in the depth and richness of the self I never explored during my first adolescence. But, your search sounds to me much like a discovery not unlike that of prophets who have come before. I think perhaps a new way to describe an old truth? And isn't that what prophets are all about, anyway?
I don't know. I'm not enlightened, not even all that wise. I just know I hear the ring of a deeper truth in your conclusion. (Thank you.)
I have been wanting to respond to your insights, but computer snafus are making getting any word in edgewise anywhere, difficult. Perhaps, in time.
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mingusI have spent much of the last year and a half befuddled by such questions, so even though it is late and my brain is riddled with trivia (tax law, today), I feel moved to respond.
What is love? Am I capable of it? How do I do it?
My musings have often been less "heady" than yours, practical girl that I am (though not as "worldly" as you).
I have been taken with this concept of a Beloved of the soul. I went to Jungian analysis, read Rumi, went to couples therapy, sang and danced about it. . . all leading to more questions. This longing. What even is it? This craving for kinship, for connection, for communion. IS it connected to a person? IS it just an "inside job"? How important is it who I am "with", or whether I'm with anyone at all? What is it I really want from the intimate others in my life?
What of different kinds of love: is it possible to experience Dalai Lama-type love with a lover? Is romantic love just some kind of biological trap we'd all be wiser to avoid? Do soulmates, or twin souls exist?
No answers, but some thoughts. I do believe that there is something to this love thing. That the Beloved concept isn't just from the ethers, but that an earthly Beloved is part of it all. That I need to find my way to universal love through my own journey, which includes others. Sometimes I have thought about how love is just this energy, it's like . . . ambient. I don't need to depend upon any one person to "give" it to me. And that's true, I think. But what I have found is that being with another person gives me an opportunity to "practice" love, and to feel out the contours of my heart, to see which parts are open and which parts closed, to see myself in another, to grow in compassion, tolerance and kindliness--through them towards myself and towards all beings.
There is also a very visceral aspect to it. At the couples camp, a popular saying was "love is a decision, not a feeling." The hell it is! It is certainly a feeling, a bodily feeling, for me. Not one I feel every moment of every day for every person I love, but one I want to be feeling at least sometimes in each love relationship. And there is this animal thing: Kristin, you'll maybe appreciate this. Think of dogs, how very distinct each being is, how with certain ones you just have a connection and others you don't, how some of them you're just so delighted they even exist, with all their doggy foibles (dogs have so many; is that why we love them so?), how you can feel like you just KNOW this being, inside and out, how lovable a particular dog can be to a particular person. This is not making sense as I write it, but it has when I've thought it. Something along the lines of Mary Oliver's "let the soft animal of your body love what it loves." Don't know. Too tired. My point being, I think, that our physical selves seem to resonate with other physical selves. What's the significance? I've no idea.
If you happen to figure it all out, let me know.
Thank you all so much! I love your insights, Elisa, the physicality of your exploration...yes, there is much wisdom here. I love the idea of "practicing." Like NVC that way. Not enough to sit only with the "inside job."
But merging the outer physicality and the inside job -- there's the rub!
A temporary computer-behaving interregnum...
Your posting reminds me of the dervish whose zenlike summary of the nature of the world and existence was, simply, "Is!" For me, though, the pressing daily concern is not so much the ontology of 'Isness' but what to do upon falling out of bed each morning and tying my shoelaces. Once alert, what then? 'Just loving' is all well and good but I'm not parked in a monastic cell or family home: I'm a single man saving seed on biennials in Class A agricultural soil a block behind the Gateway mall in North Springfield and the developers' concrete-spewers are revving at my garden gate.
You offer clues as to a coherent response, I sense. "Is the dynamic that we move through in order to find equilibrium as great a truth as the balancing point itself?" you say. "Is the drive to evolve in consciousness as we dance toward equilibrium in the moment what this is all about -- learning to love, make peace and beauty?" Yes. But what exactly is involved in learning to love, make peace and beauty? What are my dance steps? Who is on my dance card? How might I choose to 'move through'?
In any meeting of heaven and earth there will, almost of necessity, be a bruising. Ordinarily this crossing over will not take place in us without awful trouble: dark night of the soul trouble, darkness of Good Friday on Golgotha trouble. As the contemplative Stephen Bachelor puts it, "Awakening, freedom and sanity are only intelligible in the context of confusion, constriction, violence and chaos." It appears to be a law of the psychic life that the way up that isn't also the way down will end in calamity. If it is to be secure, our ascent to heaven must proceed from a prior and indeed from a simultaneous harrowing of hell. Gandhi was explicit: "Transformation without suffering is evil." Peacemaking, beauty-making, within and without is, of necessity, a deeply trying path. We are back to the subject of bitters, again.
For my part, I keep returning to the no-nonsense Kabbalist, Shimon ben Gamliel: "Compassion," he says, "fills no mouths. Pity, builds no houses." Implicit in ben Gamliel's observation, I sense, is an insistence that "Becoming as Being and Sinking into what Is," or "Just loving" is but a halfway house on the path of what it is to be fully human. It is a fine thing to cultivate an awakening that makes us islands of illumination, compassion and tranquility, but what about the biosphere crashing in tatters around us? What about extinction, renditions, the ravages of hyperaggressive capitalism and politics as usual? In a society that lives by conquest and possession, individual professions of steadfast love for Creation's active presence strike me as noble, but incomplete. Life is among us: peace and beauty can be fully self-realized by individuals only in the kind of co-association which empowers its members to be co-creators of a social order in which humankind lives in harmony with one another and all that lives. This is the message of the prophets and, surely, the medium-as-message of deep gardening.
It appears that we are now stumbling into an age when the message of One Love and the prophetic responsibilities it implies may be regarded, broadly, with clarity, not as 'selling ordeal' so much as pointing to the means of transcending our self-created agonies, not least because a Reckoning, as prophesized, is now crashing in upon us. Consequences, consequences, as the spirit of Dionysus might knowingly aver. John Moriarty, adding to the adage, describes it thus: "God always forgives, people sometimes forgive, nature never forgives. Particularly is this true of repressed nature." And as Whitman perceived it, "We are Nature, long have we been absent, but now we return."
And so you and I garden deeply, where we live, aspiring to do this along lines in accord with the irresistible march of evolution, helping others do the same, aware that our revolutionary rule of thumb should play second fiddle to a rule of the index or pointing finger. Pointing inwards, it says that it is only as we deal with our inner ancien regime that we should turn our attention to the outer socio-political ancien regime. Else, having sown the wind we will be reaped by the whirlwind. Else, having sown the dragon's teeth, we will be reaped by iron armies of iron men. Such is the testament of history. Beneath the glamor of Renaissance, Reformation, Enlightenment, French Revolution, Industrial Revolution, Russian Revolution, Green Revolution and on and on, beneath this spectacle, beneath the main plot, is a subplot of horror, terror, dejection, shuddering, recoil, collapse, dark water, every new "heaven" ruled by yet one more evil angel, that incubus the State, one State after another, the same state of mind.
This time round however, we both know and hope for more. And it is happening, isn't it? We do see Paradise unfolding before us. For us, the New Jerusalem is nothing other than the New Lane County, in this very realm of existence, here and now. How blessed we are for the wisdom to comprehend that the immense challenges of our inner lives are an analog absolutely integral to the peacemaking immensities birthing in our world. Healthful alchemy. The good work. Your work, courage and nakedness are an example to us all, Kristin, and your blog a defining touchstone in this local story.
From cyberspace to meatspace: I have more cukes and winter squash for you, if need be.
Oh, I found the following, which I feel sums up the story of our movement just now. "There is one thing stronger than all the armies in the world; and that is an idea whose time has come." (Nation, 15 April 1943) As Charles Fort vernacularly put it, "It's steam engines when it comes steam engines time." Yup, enough is enough. It is steam engines time.
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