Sunday, January 3, 2010

A Quality Of The Heart

Holy cow! Down on the Feedjit widget I track in a broad way who visits this site. Today is a red letter day. Africa showed up for the first time. Welcome, Africa.

Lost love really hurts. We all know that pain. Some of it is true loss. Much of it is tangled up in other spheres of mental and emotional anguish. I can’t help knowing many things related to my lost love, stories of how it has come to be. There are always at least three stories. There are often many more.

When I love you, if I am truly mature, some of it will really be aimed at you. If I am truly mature then enough of my love will really be given to you rather than to some vision I have of you. Even then what that really means, if you are really mature, then the “really you” I know matches up with the most mature vision of the “really you” that you hold these days.

When we lose these tangled knots there is a genuine chaos of pain but much of our loss is less than real, more than real. Look closely. Some of it may be hurt false pride. How much? I only bring this up because a hurt to false pride requires one kind of healing and genuine grief quite another.

If we didn’t desperately need these connections, then we wouldn’t do this. It is much too complicated.

A Quality Of The Heart

I thought I lost love
when you left me here alone,
moving on, you said,
time to go roaming
with the boy you found next door.
Such a cliche, that.
Why couldn't you choose
someone more interesting
to run away with?
I thought I lost love
but found it wasn't in you,
my love, but in me.

March 14, 2009 9:37 PM

20 comments:

  1. Smokin' on my birthday you were! And so apt too.....xxxx

    PS Word veri is cople...snort, couple with no you.....ohhhhhh hahahahahaaaaaaaaaaa

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  2. The love you lose isn't lost - it goes on somewhere within, I think.

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  3. Christopher.

    Sometimes it is the poem -- and sometimes it is what you write before the poem. Though most times it is both. :)

    This sums it up for me:

    "If we didn’t desperately need these connections, then we wouldn’t do this. It is much too complicated."

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  4. Karen, there is a whole book I think in "where love goes". You are right that love doesn't go anywhere in the deepest sense.

    Love is like energy in this regard. It is not love's presence so much but that love must be "usable". Energy is transformed on the planet into usable forms. That is what engineering is about, making energyy available for work. Love is transformed into usable forms and that is what relationships are about. So yes, love is not lost, but relationships (the transformers and containers of usable love) are lost nonetheless.

    I would also say there is a difference between men and women in this regard. Women tend to do better isolated than men do. So when you say love goes somewhere within, that is perhaps not so universal among us, at least concerning love in some usable form. More women than men experience love going within directly, I suggest, and perhaps this is set up that way because children leave mothers. Women have to survive that for the sake of others.

    Always the rest of us tend to have more at stake in the lives and loves of women than we do in the lives and loves of men. That is why women more often have to find themselves in midlife, or why when men seem to need the same it appears more juvenile.

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  5. Liz, I love you. And yes, is it not the case that the work of loving involves the attempt to simplify things?

    Growing up seems first a task of getting more complex and then a task of simplifying without losing the flexibility of youth more than necessary and the skills we claim along the way. At least I notice in my life that the simple things last except in very specific areas.

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  6. Indeed it does Ghost, indeed it does.

    xx

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  7. Ghost, you must like me in your upside down way. You have given me your heart vision three times. I accept, will accept however many you wish me to have. I just hope that they were not taken from someone who needs them.

    The heart has its own language, its own logic, its own land, its own fire, its own light. Sometimes when we are blessed we understand and see, and begin to live as if we understand and see.

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  8. For some reason I have been thinking about this post all day (while waiting for you to pick me up for the Galactic Journey! Where are you?? My bags are packed! ;) )

    I was going to say -- that sometimes I don't allow my heart to be open enough. That was my thought today. That love maybe is not so complicated if one's heart is open -- And I can see -- Ghost has solved the problem of the closed heart by turning it upside down -- upside down - open -- What a beautiful image :)

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  9. contrary to popular belief, those are anatomically correct hearts as far as i know.

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  10. Ghost, they don't look like the pictures I got of my own heart when I had the stent put in place...oh yeah, you mean ectoplasmic hearts, don't you. I hear tell there are more than one of those per ectoplasmic being, but I might have that wrong.

    Liz, I have been waylayed out here on the Left Coast. My wings are shorn for the moment. I hate to disappoint you but my foot is nailed to the floor and I am turning unfortunate circles under the baleful eye of fate. If you can go without me...I am in the meantime trying to pull that earthy square nail. It really hurts, by the way, both my body and my pride. They tell me if I complain too much they will nail down my other foot. It's an old joke.

    As for the simplicity of love, there is no doubt that it simplifies if you can get all the defects of character and self centered motives out of it. And it is certain that when love constricts through inflammation that the solution is to open wider. However, you cannot assume the clarity of your own being does anything more for the rest of the planet. Love invites the rest in and thus the complexity and pain of the world becomes more your own. It is one test of love that you volunteer for this. The more you love the further afield that goes into the chaos of self will that abounds all around.

    That is why, precisely, that the Bodhisattva ideal is practical. We cannot clarify love without healing everyone. Somewhere along the way from few to more to all, the force of love becomes inevitable. Love's simplicity requires the alchemy of the entire planet. Nothing less really works. In Christian terms this is the transformation of God's Permitted World into God's Fulfilled World. We can all work for that. But it's gonna hurt. God wants to keep self will in the core of the human soul. There is no pain free path, because the path must be a tempering process as we rise up divine.

    We cannot void pain. It is essential. What we can do is avoid the deliberate manufacture of misery as AA's Big Book puts it.

    I do go on. Sorry. I love you, Liz. You too, Ghost.

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  11. Funny.. one of my friends on Facebook just posted this -

    "We are born alone and we die alone. During the life we live, we make friends and we love, to keep the illusion of loneliness at bay"

    In my heart, I truly believe, we are all alone. And in my heart, I also believe, that shouldn't stop us from enjoying the warmth of love, while it's there for us. And for the while it's not or lost, remember we are humble alone beings and move on. Moving on doesn't mean stop loving.. it just means, don't stay hung up on it.

    Bah! You're right. It's complicated ;)

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  12. Vinisha, I understand the core of your belief, the "alone" part. It is mainly the case, it is where we come from. It is where we stay if we choose not to accept the work of compassion, to reach across the gulf, an offering of self to Self. That is a risk. It is close to a universal path as the "greater vehicle" as Mahayana Buddhists call it.

    For me, relationship and dialogue are primary, not the aloneness, but by that I don't mean how we are related in the finite realm of this planet. Our relationships here do not last any more than anything else does. I am speaking of matters of spirit and soul.

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  13. My head does ache
    with all of this truth.
    xo
    erin

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  14. Christopher....

    I am not going without you!

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  15. Erin, I have no pills for what ails you. I checked in the book of spells entrusted to me. There are approximately 3500 different spells all gathered from different eras and positions along the Way, all dealing with truth headaches. I have no idea which one to offer up. But I can say, you have much company, and the number of spells available show they are easy to devise. I think it is best you make your own spell. :) Loving you. I love blogging too, right now. What a unique conversation!

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  16. Liz. How fond I have grown of you. I truly hope you are at rest in you spirit more and more.

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The chicken crossed the road. That's poultry in motion.


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