Obit for Love

In December of 2008 I met AJ in passing. He was at my parents’ home to give an informal talk and we hardly spoke a few words to each other. I didn’t really listen to much of his talk and after he left I didn’t give any of it much conscious thought but our meeting sparked some deeper process in me - an awakening of a deep spiritual longing that, in my desperate, decades-long, quest to numb my pain, I had also kept anesthetized.

A week after he left our home, I bought my first official journal. One morning I got up and opened it. This was the first entry I wrote. 

There is a feeling of disillusionment inside of me – the world is full of damaged souls – causing hurt and pain. Cynical and harsh no-one is prepared to believe in anything true and beautiful, these things must surely be trodden on, tainted and weak. The power of love seems lost – a fools belief in the face of hatred and hardship.

I mourn the loss of Love, the death of beauty and hope.

I have shut it down, closed it off, left it outside in the cold to suffer and struggle.

Love – I’m sorry I left you – abandoned you.

Can I welcome you back in? Am I strong enough to support you? To believe in you in such dark, dark days? Can truth and beauty really touch all of the ugliness?

Or are we destined to carry on without you? To leave you to suffer and starve – as we carry on using vices and strife to grapple with life?

Should we become hard with a bitter taste in our mouth – striking out in anger, taking power in order to survive?

And as we struggle and fight to take our place in the world – in our corner that we have claimed – tell me who will warm that corner that we huddle in? As we shiver together – our families, our clans, our gangs – in the tiny spaces we have taken with iron fists and fear – then will we miss you?

Will we remember Love left outside in the cold and damp?

Love – we will miss her then and say SHE has forsaken US. Why doesn’t she come? We will miss her warmth and beauty and wonder why she left us – how could she be so cruel?

And so you see the world will end – tiny groups of tortured souls, huddling in darkened corners, feeding off fears and victim hood.

No-one will remember Love.

She will die and so will we all. We will descend into eternal blackness – screaming with pain, dried up with sorrow, skin tight on our bones, our teeth sharpened by years of bitter struggle and anger.

And it will all have been for nothing.

Simply we aren’t strong enough to stand for Love. WE have left HER – forsaken HER. We have seen her as weakness – to be avoided and laughed upon as a silly child’s thing, a trick of the light, pathetic and simple, to be scorned and left to die alone.

Am I the only one who remembers Love? Me, who has shut her out and treated her so unkindly. Do I have the courage to open the door? – For I know she waits just outside, cold and alone and crying for all of the madness she sees.

In fact I want to go to her outside – and cry. I see what she mourns. The crazy fucked-up world so lost that it believes it is ‘found’. All of the humanity so arrogant to think it can ‘go it alone’ without Love. Humankind, that to exist amidst the madness, has itself gone insane.

I want to grieve with Love, to join her outside and cry an ocean of regret and disillusionment.

We can sit by the door,

on the step,

in the wind and rain

and feel forsaken together.

For the only alternative is to ask her in – to give her tea in the sitting room and be willing to stand for her, to ask her to warm my heart, to ask for strength to face the insanity, to heal the pain and then to be regarded as insane myself.

I don’t feel strong enough – to face the darkness –

Will Love be there to take my hand? Can I trust her? Will she forgive me for leaving her, laughing at her? Can she really warm the shady corners of the world – where vultures circle and victims hold themselves together in packs ready to fight threats and murder?

How can the world change?

I want to sit with Love on the cold front step and mourn the death of Love.

In the past four years I've learned that in order to open to love again I have to be brave enough to feel all of the sharp and painful parts inside of me that are hurt and disillusioned about life, relationships and the world that we live in.  

So this week on the blog is a journey of reflection on love. 

One of my biggest fears is still opening to and trusting love again. There is a huge dam of grief inside that the healing warmth of love threatens to burst open. So I'm writing on a mission - to foster courage and trust in this process.

Join me if you desire. 

If you write a blog and want to share your reflections on love in response to each post, link your url in the comments section. Or if you just want to share reflections in the comments, you are most welcome here friend.

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Arvarna mentioned this song to me a long time ago. Its so haunting and beautiful. Sometimes I hunger for love, other times my heart trembles at the thought, this song always moves me.