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love

"What is love but the acceptance of the other, whatever he is."
-- Anaïs Nin to Henry Miller
I have been contemplating love, real love and not just the "feeling" of love, for a long time now. Most of us are infatuated with an ideal of love or "mate" and not with human beings.  We set up arbitrary parameters saying, "I will love you if... or as long as...".  These parameters provide an artifice of safety from which we expect our beloved other to protect us from all the many unpleasant feelings arising within the scope of intimate interaction. When our ideal of other does not coincide with the fact of other, we unabashedly turn toward our beloved with a vengeance, prepared to crucify him or her for imperfections and abandon our beloved, thirsty and trodden underfoot, along the dusty path of disappointment.  Joseph Campbell wrote, "Perfection is inhuman. Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love – and I mean love, not lust – is the imperfection of the human being." When love transcends the "feeling of love" it begins to resemble love itself.  Love isn't greedy or enamored with its own glossy, photoshopped, botoxed and puffed up self concept.  Love offers itself to be known and to know.  In so doing it opens our innermost, vulnerable, raw and imperfect self to be seen...by other and perhaps more importantly by ourselves.  There is no other way to bloom.  Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary, “Where the myth fails, human love begins, then we love a human being, not our dream, but a human being with flaws." 

Comments

Unknown said…
This is so beautiful and so true!
July 5, 2015 at 9:53 AM
Wind said…
Thank you for putting words out, like a blanket by a stream, for love to lie upon and listen...
July 5, 2015 at 10:37 PM
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