Thinking Deep Thoughts || True love is …

True love is eternal, infinite, and always like itself. It is equal and pure, without violent demonstrations: it is seen with white hairs and is always young in the heart.
~Honore de Balzac 

Love.

I have been wildly in love at certain moments in my life and what stood out most was what happened to my wants and ideas about relationships and people. They disappeared like a puff of smoke into the air.

Culturally, we are obsessed with the promise of love; not so much love itself. When we are fortunate enough and ‘love’ manifests in our lives; we are never prepared to not only accept it but more importantly accept that we could in our thoughts words and deeds become a vehicle for its expression.

When I have asked people what does love feel like they describe it much the same way you would describe the wind blowing down a street: there are rustling leaves, wires swinging in the distance, some sort of sound, a slight push on the face etc. What they are describing are secondary manifestations of the passage of the wind, not the wind itself. Rustling leaves tell us only the way the wind passed it does not allow us to see the wind. In much the same way, the butterflies in the stomach, the cyclical thoughts, the sense of euphoria in the presence of the one we love  these are not love but the indicators  through which we recognize love’s passage. They are sadly not love itself.

A year, five, or 10 into the relationship the fires that once burned so brightly, and threatened to incinerate everything else in your life have cool. Now you both can huddle around that fire for life-sustaining warmth without fear of being consumed by its wild burning. Things are different, there is not that constant sense of euphoria when both of you get home after a long day of work wondering what to do about your aging parents, or your sick child, mounting bills etc ?

To me, love while it may with some people be expressed through sentimentality or lust, has nothing to do with them in the same way dried leaves have nothing to do with the coming together  of different pressure systems – the cause for wind.

What therapy and crushing loss has shown me is that we fundamentally do not know ourselves. As long as we are living, we are learning about ourselves. There are question that need to be asked:

1. How can I get to know and love  another when I don’t know myself?
2. How many of us actually love ourselves and by that I don’t mean reach for a tub of lotion whenever whatever attractive empty-headed celebrity comes into view?
3. How many of us are caught repeating cycles of self-deprecative acts and do not feel we are worthy of another’s attention?
4. How many of us are cool with ourselves as we look ?

For me all the sacrifices, all our attempts at being selfless, sincere and honest are  preparation for one moment of an experience of love not grounded in feelings of butterflies, or euphoria but some thing much, much deeper.

Some Kiss We Want

There is some kiss we want with
our whole lives, the touch of
spirit on the body. Seawater
begs the pearl to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild darling! At
night, I open the window and ask
the moon to come and press its

 face against mine. Breathe into
me. Close the language- door and
open the love window. The moon
won’t use the door, only the window

this was inspire by this post by apple_kuarr