Having a blog is like writing in a diary and leaving it open on the counter, hoping someone picks it up and reads it, and maybe adds a sticky note in response. I have been writing only sporadically, due to life and work demands (yada yada), but I expect that I will become more disciplined (HA!) and write more often.

It occurs to me that I write more in the aftermath of life's events, times right after a big stress, good or bad, when I'm able to breathe, contemplate and reflect on what just happened. Today this feels like a Jupiter place - expansive, generous, and open to possibilities.  Many bad things have been happening to me, just like to everyone it seems.  I guess I'm lucky because I feel my emotions intensely. While they can be frightening and overwhelming, when I'm done feeling the pain, it feels like a new day.  Today I want to stop suffering. The bad news is that I am totally responsible for my life and how I feel. The good news is that I'm totally responsible for my life and how I feel.  (repeat)


These have been difficult times for so many of us that the collective angst is getting to me, along with my own angst. What happened to the bliss?  Where is the happiness?  Am I getting too used to being sad?  Have I made friends with depression?  I have a dog who lives to chase squirrels. I have a number of cats, and they have all tried to teach me how to be happy in the now. I have a lot to be thankful for. I will give it a try. 

Okay, I just tried it. I found out that what I want isn't here and now.  I really want to feel loved by a lover whom I love.  I am longing for this connection. I feel lonely. I understand that we are all alone.  I understand I need to love myself this way. I think I do a pretty good job. But what I really want is a sweet caress, a long intimate look, a slow and persistent kiss.  I have lovers who love me, but alas; their lives are as full of angst as mine.  I am loved, but my heart is still yearning to connect and go as deep as I can go. The bliss is very hard to find, the happiness feels very far away and long ago.  I look up at the sky and watch the geese heading home, the hawks soaring in the updrafts, and I want to fly with someone.  Oh lover, where are you?
3 Comments
 
 
I have a friend who recently learned that her long term partner is leaving, physically and emotionally. She writes: “After several days of drama, I am zombie-like. I feel like I’ve had a frontal lobotomy. I can’t really function.” 

I write today about the loss of love and its related issues: fear, betrayal, and facing our ultimate aloneness, alone.  And I’m using my friend’s words, because her pain is very real and present for her right now. 

Fear: “Will I lose everything? Will you take not just your heart, your love, your desire for me, but also your friendship, your loyalty, your concern for my well-being?”  When we make a home and share a life, we make commitments.  If these commitments are conditional on whether the other person loves us more than another, or still wants us in their bed, these commitments can suddenly dissolve.  “I don’t know what’s going to happen to me financially. We never had a contract; my partner said we didn’t need one as she’d always love me. I guess we’ll see.” It’s really a one-two punch.  Right after the loss of love (the first punch) comes the realization that one’s whole way of life (home, possessions, support, future) is now unstable (the second punch.)

Betrayal: “How can you say you no longer want me? You just gave me a card last week: ‘When I kiss you, the rest of the world disappears’, and another last month for Valentine’s Day: ‘I want you. Forever.  And I continue to fall in love with you. Again and again.’  How can you feel these things and then just suddenly stop?!?  Or didn’t you really mean them?”  Betrayal includes a feeling that one can’t trust what one used to believe as true. When did the love die? Was it yesterday, or last year? “Have you just been going through the motions? Or were you too afraid to be honest, so you lied?” When the mind contorts around these fears, it can feel like a black hole opening up, casting everything once cherished into doubt.

My friend learned that her partner’s lover (they’ve been in a 5 year polyamorous relationship) doesn’t want to be poly anymore, so the two of them (the partner and her lover) want to explore a primary, monogamous relationship.  This is relevant in that my friend and her partner and her partner’s lover have already done a lot of work around jealously, sharing, relationship building, and communication. So for those of you open to poly, this is where it can fall apart. And for those of you convinced that monogamy is the only way, this is how it almost always ends – she leaves you for another. 

“I am so confused by your words and actions. I believe you when you say you love me, and I believe you when you say you want both of us. What I’m afraid is, you’re bargaining away our relationship to keep your lover.” So in this case, it isn’t a betrayal of a commitment to monogamy, as that was never an expectation from the beginning (although it’s a new ‘need’ of her partner’s lover). Nor was it a betrayal of a commitment to love forever, as this is always a gift that can only be continually renewed by the giver. Rather, it was a betrayal of a commitment to be honest, emotionally honest.  Is my friend’s partner giving in to emotional blackmail from her lover; is she making a Sophie’s choice? Or did her partner stop loving my friend, stop wanting to be lovers, long ago and was just afraid to say so? No one wants to be abandoned. Some people are so afraid of abandonment that they will ignore their own inner truths. They may even mislead others just to preserve the stability they crave.

I tell my friend, maybe your partner has been mentally and emotionally getting ready to leave you for some time. Maybe leaving you is so scary that those cards, her words, were intended as a shield against the unbearable knowledge, and the guilt, that she didn’t really want to be with you anymore. That’s happened to me before. I felt so guilty about leaving one of my partners long ago, I went on a buying spree and bought her lots of expensive gifts right before I left. 

We can only be honest about what we know, and we can only know what is in our conscious heart and mind. We can’t know what is in our subconscious, and this is where many of our inner truths are born. So the argument may be true, that her partner wasn’t being honest, but dishonesty is only part of the pain. Being honest still won’t alleviate the ultimate pain of abandonment, of being left alone.

Aloneness:  Fear of abandonment is an archetypal fear, innate to mammals. As infants, we are so dependant on our mothers’ care, our clan’s protection, that without them we fear we will die. Of course as adults we no longer really need to fear abandonment any more, unless you are the last person left when your team leaves Antarctica. But due to our ability to be aware of our own existence, to ponder our existence and our place in the universe, we can replace the infant’s instinctive fear with another, philosophical, fear. When we are left alone, not by choice, we suffer the terrifying realization that we are, always have been, and always will be, alone. This may trigger a spiritual crisis, or a spiritual quest. Many seek to quell the fear by creating a kind and loving god-figure who will be there for us: a mother substitute. But we can’t escape the reality of aloneness forever, because it is with other people that we continue to seek connection.  And they have the power to hurt us by leaving.

There is no consolation for this loss, there is only another day. From Ecclesiastes 1:5 “The sun rises and the sun sets; And hastening to its place it rises there again.”

I tell my friend, you are lovable, you will love again, you can work out an equitable solution with your partner, who aside from this has always been trustworthy.  It is important to know when to let go, and to accept that everything changes.  And armed with your new understanding of your partner’s limitations, can your relationship really survive? I recall the words of Jane Siberry, in her song “Love is Everything”:

So take a lesson from the strangeness you feel,

And know you’ll never feel the same.

And find it in your heart to kneel down and say

“I gave my love, didn’t I?

And I gave it big, sometimes.

And I gave it in my own sweet time, I’m just leaving.”

And I tell my friend, I am sorry for her loss.
Add Comment
 
 
I am inspired to write a new post about a recent comment I received from Loris (thank you, Loris!) 

Loris says: "your approach to the subject is note worthy,but has been written about for centries. if one were to believe that we are to become emotionless,explain the theroy of being one with the universe,to love all things unconditionly requires an emotion"

These are very important concepts; first, let me break this down into the points raised. 1. Love certainly has been written about for centuries, and yet I believe it remains a topic of great and abiding interest, and often frustration and confusion.  In fact, I believe we are prone to rarely explore the topic of love until we have lost it.  The ancient Greeks had at least four words for love.  I just read about a Sumarian love poem from 4,000 years ago.  1st Corinthians 13 is perhaps the most well known description of love in the Western world. However, we still seek to understand how love works, why it sometimes doesn't, and how to make it last.

2. I don't believe we should ever consider becoming emotionless, far from it!  Emotions are for many of us our primary language. The emotions I refer to are the reactions we have to our own judgments or assumptions.
My primary method of communication is through my emotions. Others feel more comfortable 'in their heads'. Either way, to become emotionless would be akin to losing one of my senses. But not all emotions have equal value. Fear, jealousy, resentment, shame; these and other negative emotions have kept me from loving unconditionally as I desire to do.  My thoughts often lead me down a path of incorrect assumptions that, unless I challenge them, can cause my negative feelings to thrive.  I want love to thrive instead.

3. I can't explain the theory of being one with the universe.  I believe we just are. : )
Add Comment
 
 
In honor of the generosity, and the faith and the hope that is sustaining the people of Haiti; I am awed at the power of human love.
Add Comment
 
 
I believe I've found the number one reason love dies. We kill it with our own fears and pain.  Love really can't survive the blame game. How many of us carry a grudge against those who've hurt us, and see every new hurt as justification for our defensive attitudes, even our own hurtful actions. We automatically search for someone to blame for our pain, so we don’t have to examine our own habits of unforgiving resentment and suffering. This activity keeps us from feeling love for ourselves, for those who've hurt us, and for those who come along after.  I know that if we could forgive every hurt, we can love more. But I struggle with resentments, and the urge to blame. Even worse, I've thought that if they really loved me, they wouldn't hurt me so much!

My darling cat Pan was very helpful in teaching me about this recently. I was sleeping with Pan curled in my arm. I moved, she fell off the bed, and instinctively, she reached out to catch herself with her claws. She hung by my arm. Wow that hurt. She didn’t mean to hurt me personally, she was only saving herself.  I guess I needed this example to understand the lesson. Just the night before I had the thought that every time my loved one said or did something which hurt me, it wasn't intentional, but just an instinctive reaction to fear.  
But since I was in the habit of blaming, and taking these hurts personally, I didn’t really believe it.  Now I really understand it. Thanks  Pan! 

Add Comment
 
 
Hello. Thank you for joining me.  Welcome to my space, VenusAquarius.  Here we will be talking about issues of love, intimacy, radical relationships, and sexuality.

In fact, I am attempting to write ‘The Book of Love’.  I seek to redefine love in practical ways, not in the ways that we are misled by popular culture. I will be talking about love from a spiritual perspective. I will be dispelling those myths that cloud our understanding of how to obtain intimacy. I want to share 'The Book of Love' because this is what the world needs now. I am starting here. 

Topic #1: Love is turning off our judgmental thoughts, controlling our emotions that arise based on our assumptions, and paying attention to our unexamined thinking (which results from past suffering and our focus on our own agenda).  While we may totally adore our loved one during the first trimester, soon they shock us with their ability to hurt our feelings.  We must stop thinking of our loved one as ‘out to get us’. They are not trying to hurt us.  (If you think your loved one IS out to hurt you, please contact a supportive group such as the YWCA.)  

Topic #2:  We must commit to actively loving ourselves the way we want others to love us.  I credit my current and past lovers, and my animals (especially my cat Pan), for helping me see the truth of this essential understanding (more on Pan later.)

Let’s look at these one at a time:

Judgmental thoughts arise when we think we have the answer, when we ‘know better’ than others what is right. IF we are lucky, we know what is right for ourselves. (How many times have I been wrong about that – uncountable!)  Before I proceed, I must first address the ‘essential minimal threshold’ (the EMT): that one knows how to tell if a situation or person is a threat to their basic safety.  Obviously I care about establishing the EMT: that the person you are with is safe to be with.  (If you think that the person you are with, or with someone you know, is not safe, please proceed to the nearest exit.) Even this can be tricky. However, this kind of judging is critically important if we, or those we love, are in danger from emotional or physical abuse.  

The problem is, those most at risk are often least likely to be able to objectively judge this situation.  For this discussion, we must assume that we have chosen to associate with people that meet a certain threshold for personal safety.  Once we have achieved that, and here’s the clincher: we have no right to judge another’s actions, lifestyle, choices, modes of expression, etc. Why? When we judge we lose the opportunity to understand, we create a wall instead of a bridge.  To achieve this goal means keeping our opinions about others to ourselves, and recognizing these opinions for what they are: our ego preening itself.

Example #1:  It is not my business whether my lover goes to therapy, loses weight, gets a different job, gets some medical procedure done, is attracted to someone else, or even shares my values. This has been a really a hard one for me to let go of.  I have often felt that I did have valuable insights or knowledge that I could impart to my loved ones.  If they would only listen to me and take my advice, they would be better off.  I may be partially right, in that sometimes I can be intuitive and perceptive, and I can see a path that could benefit someone else if they would just take it.  But....
 
I can’t possibly be 100% right, as I have no real idea what the other person needs.  Furthermore, the act of giving advice creates a ‘one up, one down’ relationship, a dynamic that is not conducive to intimacy.  It’s sending the wrong message: that my judgment of them is, they are somehow lacking; and my judgment of myself is, I have the answer. The ego loves this game and it is a hard one to control. 

Of course, there are times when a timely word of caution, a suggestion, our opinion, can be helpful. Again, if you feel that the person you love is about to embark on a life threatening adventure, your direct intervention may be prudent.  We would do better to see these as rare and special circumstances, not commonplace. Those of us who grew up in very dysfunctional homes may not be able to readily ascertain when this is the case.  Practice and therapy helps.

Next Time: In my next conversation, I will describe three more examples of when we get in our own way and damage our chances for intimacy.  Please, if you have a thought about this, I’d like to hear it. Comments are welcome.
4 Comments
 
 
Please forgive me, I'm still getting dressed. This may take a while. Can you come back a little later? I'll try not to keep you waiting too long.
1 Comment
 

Create a free website with Weebly