The Many Natures of Love

In love I unconditionally accept the evolution of others

Love Vibes

Love is supposed to be in the air. I am all in on that idea. I sure am feeling it, but I have a switch to turn on (in meditation) that can condition the air with it, not always successfully, there are circuit breakers to be reckonned with, but more often than not. The downside to that sublime air – and lamentably there is one – is that one may not set conditions all round without violating free will - even in matters of love!

If love is largely memory dependent (to recollect, recover, restore, or start afresh), may we note how some of us do and some of us don’t remember much from our earliest childhood. Why is that? What does any memory serve.

Audible’s Valentine’s Day Book Recommendation is tempting me:

Summary
^{Lamorna Cove - a tiny bay in Cornwall, picturesque, unspoilt. A hundred years ago it was the haunt of a colony of artists. Today, Mel Pentreath hopes it is a place where she can escape the pain of her mother's death and a broken love affair, and gradually put her life back together.}

Love your mother and father

Matthew says (in 19:19): honour your father and mother but love your neighbour. Would honour rank higher back in the day? Was love understood differently? Or is our evolution dependent precisely on our getting on ever better with the strangers in our own back yard with true affections and meaningful attentions? Is this to move away from innate instinct to a higher form of consciousness? We then have far to go, yet, may I chuckle with a hint of sarcasm for the Fence War I have been embroiled in the past year and some more to come.

The relationship to our parents has changed immensely in only a century, and maybe also not at all quintessentially. What is the function of adult relationships based on a parental bond? Can it be a marker of love at all? Or does it harp back to the days of lineage and all the financial and karmic matters thus enlaced? How come some of us are ready for our parents to pass over and others will never get over this finality so closely tied to their own incipience?

Love and Marriage

Some of us marry for love and give birth to love babies. Most of us don’t (know what love is) and also end up pulling out souls which have slipped under the ice.

Love and Peace

As my own garden is being overhauled and fences WILL be put up (and my neighbours win, because they don’t want to contribute and have shared fences, but won’t fight me on putting up my own, either) I am becoming ever more sure what type of memories I need in order to die in peace.

A state of peace must be the highest good at the point of death, surely? Is this not why we even grow older than old – with peace so hard to find (and not to be mistaken for drudgery and prefab routine) - into our nineties or even past a hundred? What else are we really doing with this bonus time? In esoteric science, the guidelines for personal development tend to stop at 63. The rest is aftershock, or settling into who you are, for this life.

One ingredient for this peace, it seems to me, is the freedom to pick your own family. @trucklife-family’s latest post alerted me to the wealth of opportunity and liberation in that.

Love Obliges

If left up to us, quite plainly, some people will qualify as family, others won’t. This will leave some of us who won’t still rooting for those who don’t count us in when it counts. What do we stand to gain from this lack of inclusion? For, surely, life is fair to all who abide by the rules of living the best they know how? Goes to show, different paths for different folks, and happiness is but a measure of how far you have come on your very own.

Brotherly Love

Those priviliged with choice would never mean to, but is it karma-free to simply overlook a cabin when the ship goes down and there are only so many places in a life-boat? Some of us cannot cope with that sense of negligence (but it is it that?) and we forever lie awake, woken up by engine sounds around midnight, having done our best to bed down before the bewitching hour. The motor of survival never ceases to grind and to the morally hyper-conscious, never more loudly than in the desolation of the wee morning hours.

Filial Love

My son is very quick to liken me to his girlfriend’s mother. As far as he is concerned, we are both having it off with a dude because we’ve been gagging for it – and so the aforementioned mother reports on and justifies to her daughter her latest conquest, Mr. No.5 (in the past 12 months), without mincing words, over breakfast. My love story goes untold. It is judged, notwithstanding, probably by the measure of past experience (relationships that are termed “failed” by general consensus even if rather termed “completed” by myself). (I count 5 lovers in 30 years.)

Paternal Love

My father is mistrustful about my garden project. He warns me that I will be summoned to court as yet, maybe not tomorrow, or on Monday when my new fences will (finally) be put up, the neighbours agreeing to allow me, if unswayed about refusing to cooperate or share costs, but I may rest assured, he hammers on, I will be in trouble, yet. He furthermore insists that it is not possible to be surrounded by that many uncooperative people (four out back, and four across the road out front, battling with my workmen over parking space during the renovation). He knows nobody who can find that many idiots in one street. What do I do to foster such ill will towards us? Sorry, Pops, I am not that likeable by nature I guess. Too intense in matters of love and a lousy player at life and its desperate modes of survival.

Love Thy Neighbour

My father, of course, we all may conclude, implies that I am lacking in social airs and graces. It has to be my fault that I have gathered around me such an uncooperative vibe - as if I attract them (some have moved in recently) or have turned them against me by anti-social behaviour (I do tend to keep to myself, but does that equate anything negative or judgemental of them in turn?).

It is not the Crips and the Bloods around here, either, mind. We are all quite civilised in that respect. But I do miss that notion of loving your neighbour as the gateway to something more noble still. Manners maketh the man; this basic formality could develop into an inner urge to make the world better for everybody, in a way that you can feel - with a certain responsibility - it is good for them, not just because you hope it will do to leave everybody free to make of it what they will; nor because you want to impose your way of being onto others.

Maternal Love

My mother does not want to meet my new friend and lover. She has many arguments against our making anywhere near half decent a match, so she’d rather not get involved and alter her picture of me as single till the day I die. Her opinion of me is clear: I am a dogged zealot and I can’t think straight; I lack the astute feminine wiliness and sophisticated analysis to assess people arightly and only the needy gravitate towards me. Her opinion of him is set, based on what she has managed to glean from social media sites, he neither keeps up for anything very serious nor she knows her way about (till now).

In general, as mothers do perhaps, she worries for me, without saying much, other than that she loses sleep over me and my overly emotional ways (which is ironic since I badger my companion to reduce emotion to a bare minimum – to allow for a better flow of our feeling). Every now and then she professes her undying and motherly love for me. Her evaluation of us being the best of friends, however, has worn too thin over the past years for it to mean anything much to me. Instead, I feel remarkably betrayed by a woman for whom it is now too late in the day to be a mother to me and who has lost too much of her self in the everyday pressures that compress women all the time into insignificance.

What is this relationship we have with our mothers meant to serve? Is it not often little more than the longest relationship we have ever had? It is notable how messed up people often are, who have had but a short one with theirs. We know instinctively that mother-child relationships are hallowed, but by what? Love?

Then love is an odd quality.
No wonder we would rather seek the passionate side of love and relish the sensation of a soaring heart. Is that a better love? Maybe, if only, because it is doomed to pass in a world prone to gravity (all that goes up must come down)?

Love Sensibly

This is what my parents taught me. A marriage is a union between two rational people who are loyal to eachother. The best business agreement you’ll ever find on a personal level. Trust no one else, both my parents agree upon, if not on anything else much. How to trust eachother, though, if not in love with eachother? My mother assures me she married my father with enough love for him if not for love. She dared tie the knot in the knowledge that there was always the option of divorce. I think we all do when we believe in the sacrament of marriage: till death do us part (the ultimate divorce). But can there be any true parting in love?

If not, then beware! Do not make promises lightly and do all that you can to honor them.

Have a great Valentine’s day!

---

Photo credits:
mine except: the wood carving of mother and child by Phil Hearing and the grayscale picture of mother and child by Andrae Ricketts
The fractal firefox wallpaper 5 can be found here