Life: Celebration of Love

I haven’t blogged much lately, for reasons to follow. I have simply lived lately and have found little time or need to reflect, to gather my thoughts, to write them so as to know them. Reflection is, after all, a sign of breakdown, a breakdown of flow of life that is pulling at us all. Perhaps not. Perhaps one may reflect and write in the flow. Yes, of course.

As I have mentioned before, love and death are sure to be the two great mysteries of humankind. Though it has been like a boulder on my ribs in the past, death now seems to be of little interest to me, suddenly young and immortal. It is love that fills my heart with wonder these days. I tried to write of this last week, but a wise friend suggested I sit on and ‘sit with’ the post, most prominently for the sake of the women involved. He was right, and I am very grateful.

But now I (again) feel the need to just say something. I am simply compelled to write, to concretise, to lay in place some of my countless meandering thoughts. The cost of new love is confusion and uncertainty, but the reward (if we allow it) is an openness to life, an opportunity to accept the confusion and uncertainty that unlock the mystery and beauty of life. Acceptance is the flow; and the flow is life itself: growing, changing, caring, loving…

I recently watched (for the 3rd time) “Derrida” – a documentary on the founder of Deconstruction – in which Derrida complains that philosophers never speak of their romantic lives; and he then refuses to speak about his own, saying that it is ‘simply difficult.’ Indeed it is difficult to speak of our romantic lives, perhaps because it is a last vestige of the ego, a final hidden place where we can act as sole gatekeepers to others. Yet it is also what so undeniably links us to others, the fact that we are all sexual beings. Even those who vow themselves to celibacy cannot vow away their sexual organs and urges and the most honest will often tell you it is their greatest struggle.

And perhaps this is untrue; perhaps it is our connection as spiritual beings that links us most deeply; perhaps the greatest struggle in life is letting go to the spirit. One of my greatest teachers, Matthew Flickstein – a Vipassana master and developing mystic – used the phrase, “usurping the absolute” whenever he saw a student’s ego or conceptual mind taking over in the face of a spiritual breakthrough. We do the same with love, which itself is a spiritual breakthrough. We get bogged down in expectations, comparisons, associations, baggage, and the rest… Let go… Smile and breath…

Oddly enough, most of the usurping in this case has been done by friends and family: “perhaps this is a rebound,” says one, “I would question just how deeply you really loved Ana,” offers another. I neither doubt the depth of my love for Ana nor feel the slightest sense that this is a rebound. In some sense I know I will always love every woman I have ever loved. And in that same way I am continually ‘rebounding’ from all of them, allowing their beauty and wisdom to fill my days. Yet I can also, slowly and often grudgingly, accept that bad timing, conflicting deepest desires and beliefs, and diverging live-paths sometimes mean that love must live in the past if it is to live on at all, leaving room for new love now and in the future.

So enough usurping – enough looking back for now – it has been wonderful, every bit of it – and I have work to do.