At this point I have so many questions. What is the meaning of Love? What is the structure of an exciting love story in contemporary times? And once the story commences how do you keep it going? How can we trust what seems real, or for that matter, how can we trust anything these days? Nothing seems to be built to last: cars, clothes, dental crowns and especially relationships. With the high divorce and infidelity rates, marriage seems like a bad bet even for people with a gambling addiction. The phrase serial monogamy sounds too much like a Curable STD. Should we not have a collections of loves and/or marriages: one for sex and one for kids, one for therapy, one for companionship and maybe a Las Vegas one for fun.I know things have changed since the 1950's especially with gender roles shifting, blurring and smearing. Women juggle the stress of careerism with the gravity of biology with a sense of truncated liberation and Men heed to the duty to provide at the risk of emotional impairment and hesitating masculinity.
The way and how we communicate these days is so conducive to the impersonal and emotional fakery. Emails/texting is such a contraceptional prophylactic agency of deception and detachment, where the virtual is virtually everywhere, competing vociferously with the staleness of a pedestrian reality. And in the land of Internet Connections, ithis and ithat, where busy people meet, and check in about their day, find out how someone is coping with their self doubt and insecurities there is insidious vapor of self-centeredness and faux connections that impede the journey to the things that we all say we want: Love and Intimacy.
I know how to love children, nature, friends, objects, things, ideas and dreams. But to love a man is something different, I am learning. It is more art and not mathematics. It is spiritual and not political. It is magical not didactical. It is a gigantic leap of faith not a calculated formula that lands one in the lap of safety and comfort. I realized that the thirst for knowledge and truth at the expense of magic destroys the spirit, blemishes the art and spoils the palate. I know first hand the failure of theory over practice, talking over hugging, and dreaming over living. As I engage my partner in the journey for love , I must simply love more from the heart and less from the mind and realize that a whisper can be more powerful than a roar and that small steps can be more meaningful than gigantic ones. But am I willing to sacrifice and dwell in places of famine and scarcity for this love and keep waiting, remaining open and not give up and not relenting to the adversary who is impudence, impotent connection, desperation? The answer is most certainly, YES.
I know patience is essential and preparedness is foundational, however the wait is killing me! Images of a past life suggest that I was a healer and that I was much too busy...or made myself to appear that way, to love and be open...My love was exhibited in the service that I constantly found myself in to those who were in need of easing of pain and suffering from life's insidious diseases and ailments. Today I suffer the ailment of heartsickness, red eyes and swollen nasal passages are clinical presentations of the deeper ailment. My prescription, to stand fast. To experience what the Sufi call "weathering that which wears you down, a firing of the soul and spirit" I know this to be true....what I possess is real, what I am able to co-create is real, and love....be it the search for such or the abandonment of the same is timeless.
I hope to apply the examples of times' greatest lovers in my journey, and that others will find a way to do the same.
