chelidon

"Driven by the force of love the fragments of the world seek each other that the world may come into being."
--Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

While going back into my journal last night to look up some things I'd written about karma, I found a piece of relationship counselling I'd done about five or six years ago, and there was a bit of truth in the last part of what I wrote that I kept for some reason, probably because it veered into poetic territory, and I liked it. Not poetry, mind you, none of this has ever seen an editorial pen, but for a quick stream-of-consciousness note whipped off to a friend, it captured something true for me.

I believe that love is perhaps the hardest thing any of us attempts as humans, to truly love another. Certainly there are many kinds of love, but in the very deepest, the ego has to be strong enough to trust that it is possible to dissolve into another without being lost, and yet open enough to hold the essential paradox of union and seperateness -- of shared lives, and still separate truths and embodiments. Love is neither cruel nor kind, but it can be easy to see it as either. For me, I cannot gainsay it, because it has and every day does brings into my life blessings, riches and joy beyond belief. It ain't easy, and it ain't nohow fair, but as one of the deepest ways we experience union with the infinite and divine, and just for the delicious, frustrating, glorious mystery it is, it is an essential part, for me, of what it means to be fully human.

So, no less than to the person I wrote in early '99, I wish you good love, and good luck -- I figure we can all use plenty of both.

-------

In innocence and knowing,
you give the gift of your trusting, open heart to your beloved,
and if worthy of that precious keeping, and you,
of theirs, perhaps your lives will come to blossom together
like the pure, perfect Rose of the Impossible--
stems, roots, thorns entwined, two lives and souls become one,
and three, yet still, ever two, your immiscible natures poured and joined
in the alembic of life and death, distilled and purified into
your essential essences. If both Natures prove true,
you will come to know yourself, and the other,
and that third thing of life which you create between you,
the conception of your lives, minds and souls,
a being of beauty, terror, knowledge and joy...
What is false is burned away in the fierce retort,
and what remains after is whoever you truly are,
together and separate.

Love is neither good nor bad, a force of nature
just is, itself. Wild magick, untameable, timeless,
unbound, and without restraint. It fills strong cups and shatters
weak ones. It passes as an ageless storm which pulls up
trees by their roots, shakes strong houses to their foundations, and
leaves nothing with the same likeness or feature thereafter.
It is an exquisite pressure, which few can bear. But those
who enter it unafraid, and can carry its mantle with grace, are blessed
with companions on the soul's journey forever.

and that's all nice prose, but it's also a longshot, and hard work, and a
hazard to stability, normalcy, self-control, self-respect and any delusions
of having even a rough understanding of how the universe works. And it's
the greatest blessing I've ever known. So, sincerely, good luck to you.

`Io,

--Chelidon

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Z(X-YOTe)
"And gone the Godless destiny of death and desperation, and gone the
madness of a life committed to uncare, and gone the tears and terror of the
brutal days and endless nights where time alone would rule.

And I-I rises to taste the dawn, and find that love alone will shine today.
And the Shining says: to love it all, and love it madly, and always
endlessly, and ever fiercely, to love without choice and thus enter the
All, to love it mindlessly and thus be the All, embracing the only and
radiant Divine: now as Emptiness, now as Form, together and forever, the
Godless search undone, and love alone will shine today."
-- Ken Wilber, _Sex, Ecology, Spirituality_