FEAR OR LOVE?
love exists on many levels. one of the most basic and necessary forms of love is a love of life. if we were not taught that life is good, if we were taught habits of fear, addiction, abuse and trauma, then it is very difficult to move from fear to love. but is is often the pain in primary relationships being dysfunctional that drive the individual to seek a greater, more universal love. if we do not love life, if we are at odds in ourselves with the purpose of being alive in a world that has so much suffering, then we cannot learn to love ourselves or another. the first kind of love necessary is a love and surrender to life itself and that love being unconditional, for just as we can never control another person, we can never control what life spontaneously hands us. wether we face joy or pain, union or separation, to love is a choice and it takes willpower to choose love again and again.
consumerist love- we spend more time trying to package ourselves to be worthy of love than being interested in learning how to love. we try to make ourselves look the best so that we will be chosen, like a product off a shelf, to be loved before our date expires. this is the classic consumer model of fear. what if we are not chosen? what if we are never deemed truly worthy of being loved? all of our existential loneliness is stirred and becomes fear of abandonment. and so much time is spent in the obsession to attract love that we do not learn to love the other in any selfless kind of way. what is the point of love?
perhaps the story of my life would be very different if i had learned to be more interested in how to love others than hoping to be loved myself. all the loves i have known have been fleeting, ephemeral, like quicksilver. the feeling of truth dances in the palm of my hand hand like water and then vanishes, like the exhale. like the ocean evaporates to the cloud to rain down again in another form. in this one fragile, tiny and trembling body, the temple of such an enormously thirsty soul, will i ever feel loved enough? again, perhaps the answer is to flip the question around. will i ever learn to love enough? the closest thing to unconditional love i have known is with my own son, and this love too was born of a selfishness. after feeling abandoned by my own parents, i wanted to have a baby to create that unbreakable bond- to have something tethering me to this unstable world.
LOVE- "It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. ... And one fine morning ---- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" - F Scott Fitzgerald
love exists on many levels. one of the most basic and necessary forms of love is a love of life. if we were not taught that life is good, if we were taught habits of fear, addiction, abuse and trauma, then it is very difficult to move from fear to love. but is is often the pain in primary relationships being dysfunctional that drive the individual to seek a greater, more universal love. if we do not love life, if we are at odds in ourselves with the purpose of being alive in a world that has so much suffering, then we cannot learn to love ourselves or another. the first kind of love necessary is a love and surrender to life itself and that love being unconditional, for just as we can never control another person, we can never control what life spontaneously hands us. wether we face joy or pain, union or separation, to love is a choice and it takes willpower to choose love again and again.
consumerist love- we spend more time trying to package ourselves to be worthy of love than being interested in learning how to love. we try to make ourselves look the best so that we will be chosen, like a product off a shelf, to be loved before our date expires. this is the classic consumer model of fear. what if we are not chosen? what if we are never deemed truly worthy of being loved? all of our existential loneliness is stirred and becomes fear of abandonment. and so much time is spent in the obsession to attract love that we do not learn to love the other in any selfless kind of way. what is the point of love?
perhaps the story of my life would be very different if i had learned to be more interested in how to love others than hoping to be loved myself. all the loves i have known have been fleeting, ephemeral, like quicksilver. the feeling of truth dances in the palm of my hand hand like water and then vanishes, like the exhale. like the ocean evaporates to the cloud to rain down again in another form. in this one fragile, tiny and trembling body, the temple of such an enormously thirsty soul, will i ever feel loved enough? again, perhaps the answer is to flip the question around. will i ever learn to love enough? the closest thing to unconditional love i have known is with my own son, and this love too was born of a selfishness. after feeling abandoned by my own parents, i wanted to have a baby to create that unbreakable bond- to have something tethering me to this unstable world.
LOVE- "It eluded us then, but that's no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. ... And one fine morning ---- So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past" - F Scott Fitzgerald
beautiful
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