Wednesday, June 13, 2007

IF IT AIN'T FREE, IT AIN'T LOVE


A sight for your sore eyes only
Sun's shadow in deep water


I don’t see much difference between happiness and love. The gratitude for being aware of the expanse of one’s life that lies at the heart of either when evoked by internal observations of external events and objects and the ideas they set loose. All too often the innocent reminder is taken to be the repository for such feelings and duly assigned the post of obedient guardian … whether they want it or not. Feeling love for anything may be understood to be its own happy unqualified reward — anything less freely felt only cheapens it. How, in the name of love, does loving someone invoke a debt requiring their obedient fidelity? That’s how governments act and they hardly know each other, much less envisioned unqualified love beyond the diplomatic smiley face mask. Which came first the individual cells playing king of the hill against each other or the body of the government playing king of the planet from the top of the hill? Hiyo, Pyramid, and away.

In a recent exchange with a friend I love without qualification she said, “the proof of real love is how much it hurts!” I can only think the only thing hurting are the ego’s too old and stiff qualifications being asked to stretch too far. Whatever such love is, it must be artifice if it can’t get around it. A good idea includes everything.

10 comments:

karoline in the morning said...

what a thought inspiring post mr.g..

love, anything other than that which is given unconditionally is not love, it is possession, and want. possession and want are for the collection of material goods. material possessions cannot love back..jmo

k :))

Garth said...

Like many of life's intangibles, to define it is to destroy its potency.
Best left as an experience of hope and hurt; frustration, elation and chest heaving release from the cage of the self.

Garth said...

Another great piece btw :]

Erica said...

Hi Todd :) I like your ideal, but I also really like the fragile dystopia in which I live, where human communication is a tenuous exchange of beauty and longing and passion and profound uncertainty.

My love is different from your love is different from her love is different from their love....

Did I mention I love you?

--erica

Yodood said...

k- isn't the lack of need to be loved back the point?

Pisces- speak of of love only in terms of its abuse, what it's not? Perhaps one of our cultural tautological mazes.

Erica-Utopian though you may call it, the love of which I speak is no more than a sketch of the love by which I live, beholding and encompassing whatever buts you may offer as exceptions to an Eden you perceived I believed. All balances are delicate.

Though love goes without saying, in a blog comment it must be said, I love you.

Lilwave said...

To keep in context, at the time the discussion was about faith. I was sharing with you my opinion that to love is to have faith. You said you had no faith in anything and that you knew when you loved. I did say pain of love was a way we could prove it was real to ourselves. To commit ourselves to deep love that goes beyond the happy emotions, pain is an emotion that is attached to it just like happiness. Love iself is more than an emotion. Happiness attached to love will not always be there. It takes faith to know you love someone during the times you aren't happy with them. That was my point when explaining how I have stayed married for 21 years. No ego, just knowing what to do when the good emotions are not present and leaning on the faith that you still love them anyway. Faith is believing in something in spite of your current human emotion. That is just my opinion. Sorry........

Erica said...

Man, going back & reading what I wrote, I sound hippy-dippy as all hell! I really like your response :) Here's to the delicate edge on which we balance our spirits! Also, to taking liberties because playing with words is fun ;)

Giddily & trippily,
--erica

Yodood said...

Lilwave,
I suppose I must reiterate how I used your term, God, to make the metaphor for my vision of the spark of life, the individual genius that generates and enlightens our consciousness lying at the core of each of us eyes on the potato, which, in turn gains its gestalt potato consciousness from ours just as we do from our cells on an endless evolutionary adventure of enlightenment as the universe satisfies its curiosity about itself, imagining things to not know, asking rhetorical questions just to see who answers, always observing from a center it cannot quite touch.

If there is any parallel like using god for the spark of life or the consciousness of the universe I could see doing it with the same reversal of direction in that anything like the faith, trust, or belief you speak of having in things outside you, for me would have a function only in reference to some certainty I want to gain and establish in my perceptions of reality. I am not, nor do I want to be certain of anything — I'm pretty sure of that! My certainty looks more like a dynamic theoretical probability evolving throughout this life unafraid of experience outside the box imposed by the outside. Having given myself such free rein how could I deny the same to someone just because I love them. It is the same as our ability to choose our evolutionary path by using it to either compete and satisfy ourselves with some measure of besting others or to become better than ourselves through clear observation of our motivations and their consequences for a world with which we wish to live in harmony, in which we feel free to let God out right in front of everyone.

Someone said love is when you don't have to say your sorry … I can get into that.

karoline in the morning said...

mr.g...

k- isn't the lack of need to be loved back the point?

whatever flys your kite...give it, receive it, the ultimate, a no strings attached kinda love...

karoline in the morning said...

i almost fergot..

:)))

k

;)