dream, perchance to love. sometimes it feels like a life: a contemplative essay on the nature of love

Here I am again, tears falling from eyes, words falling from fingers, only not on paper as they did then, but onto a seamless, clear, impermeable sheet of glass with wire and chips inside glowing light from a screen that makes sounds like the pitter patter of a heavy rain as I touch its cold surface to form letters, then words, then phrases, then paragraphs, pages, chapters, a story... a story better told in the dim light, naked and warm in the arms of a body with a heart that loves, and soul that knows there is never anything more true than this moment we are in, and a mind with the courage to stand alone together in the barren wasteland of what remains. A story better told without the veil of words that cling to the page, hang in the air, code the matrix, that has long lost its meaning if it is told to entertain. It is the story of the birth of a mind, the making of a love, a saving of the soul in the taking of a life, a dying from the world of illusion to a wake of the real, a rebirth that has forgiven humanity but cannot forget eternity.

I do not know if this story has an ending, though I know it hasn't a beginning and it tends to wander out of context and beyond time, yet always returns in waves and flashes of memory, melancholy, and truth, ebbing and flowing through the currents of all of my yesterdays, and so I bear this torch through the dark night to find all of our tomorrows as well.

What is love? What is it to be in love? Can these questions be answered in words, in poetry, in song? How does love feel, look, taste, sound, act? Does it hurt? If it hurts how can it be a good thing? If it can't be bought or sold, proven, tested, or tamed then what use is it to anybody? If I find it how do I keep it? What if it gets stolen? What if...

What if love really is what makes the world go round, what if it is all you need, what if it is free, what if it is forever, what if it is inexhaustible, what if love is god and God is the devil? What if everything oppressive, unjust, unnatural, manipulative, deceitful, repressive, diseased, and sinful in this world is dependent on only one thing... that we have been taught to believe that love is blind, that love is a biological function between a man and a woman to make more men and more women to cling to one another in fear and distrust as they desperately climb over each other to some great reward high in the sky. What if everything beautiful, kind, fun, exciting, intoxicating, sexy, creative, smart, true, and pure in this world is dependent on only one thing... that love is wherever, whomever, whatever, however, and whenever we make a connection, to the capacity we choose to let love in, give love out, let it sing, watch it dance, see it shimmer, set it free, let love kiss the sky and fall like a purple rain, all the love we create is everlasting.

...and what if... What we are taught to believe is an illusion, everything we are taught to see, hear, and feel is the illusion of a world unreal, an external system of operation unquestioningly accepted and internalized from birth into any structured system. Each new thought, lesson, opinion, fact, decision, understanding, concept, duty, responsibility, promise, idea, becomes a wall, a leech, a repeating loop for the mind to run on and let the personality know that its good and happy as the consciousness goes about it's day of eat, sleep, shit, work, play, fuck, maybe plan for the future, "try" to learn from the past, eat, sleep, shit, work, play, fuck... FUCK!! What the fuck happened? Making a living happened...and life went by while work becomes money, and loyalty becomes commitment, and friends become strangers, and volunteering becomes god fearing, health becomes vanity, happiness become leisure, and the car, house, college fund, retirement plan, burial plot, last will and testament map out the lines and borders and shores of a very small world held together only by somebody else's words of some obsolete laws that nobody believes in, yet each holds the other to the miserable grindstone of what was once called love, family, home, community.

Many are the declarations and the promises of love, of things to come, of dreams, hopes, futures, and good intentions that fade and are forgotten in

time, when love is made to share reality with social beliefs based on lies and a constructed psychology, when love and life are made to separate into mutually exclusive elements and conscious living is forced into subconscious repression, unconscionable suppression, and unconscious projection by anger, guilt, shame, denial, blame,...so many artificial emotions to derail any genuine feeling from traversing this divide. The joy division, where the potential for greatness and the raw energy for the search for truth as inspiration for change leaks instead into the abyss of collective ignorance and denial. T o become as one is not to mold the other to fit your perception, or even to hold the other to what they may have thought at one time was their perception, but to each be in accord with the other in love, no matter what the form or appearance, always shifting with the ebb and flow, rise and fall, dark and light, give and pull of the other. Life is natural, Death is natural, grief is natural, joy is natural, Love is super-natural...it is the breathing of life into the mind, clearing the cobwebs of the intellect from the third eye of the heart, the stillness where can be heard the sigh of inspiration that whispers on the lips of a lover.

That one love for which everybody searches for is not to be found, the one will never the right one, never the convenient one, the easy one, always too good or not good enough, playing hard to get or too easy to bed, not the right color, too rich or not rich enough, too serious, too loud, too... Of all that love can be, it will not share with superficiality, pettiness, and pride, it exists to destroy all that you think you are and all that you think you know and bring you to the source that makes real what is true and indivisible, elemental, pure, force out of the husk of your constantly self affirming image the someone that you are meant to be , not bring you the someone that you can belong to, or who will save you from yourself, or rub the belly of your ego, that you admire like a prized possession, or use to your satisfaction, depend on for a sense of security, or manipulate for the delusion of control . Love is forgiving, not from blindness or weakness, but tempered in the fires of shame on self for thinking that of itself it ever knew the meaning of love or the feeling of being truly alive, for only in the heart enraptured by love may the consciousness surrender to the vision of the lover, each act of forgiveness shedding a veil of the collective ego illusion. A compassionate heart that yearns for the truth of the other in the active acceptance of suffering opens the mind and pacifies the ego, actively sensing and feeling in the moment, being for the very first time...for love remembers everything and knows not good or bad, only the real from illusion.

The collective ego illusion makes a model of the other in your own image, a complimentary facsimile to your own perception of yourself, a well to quench your thirst, a body to fill your loneliness, a possession to have and to hold until death do you part as entitled by witnessed promises and standardized vows and enforced by the church of the state. So innocently it begins, a proposal made, a date set, an announcement made, a ceremony planned, to formalize a commitment to each other to be documented to a piece of paper in the form of a license, not unlike the process for permission to drive, carry a weapon, or go fishing, but to own half of all the labor and assets of your partnership, eligibility to the benefits of one anothers' "gainful employment" in an unspoken pact to give one another unto the labor market of building the financial empires of the powerful and the rich. The promise of love has turned away from the uncompromising regard for the spirit of another human as a sacred being, to a secular contract made to one another in the name of human law and worldly possessions to hold each other to the flame of social roles, gender norms, upward mobility, property ownership, family values, self-help, home improvement, and suburban romanticism. In short, the personal vow to care for another human as oneself, degraded into the duty of continually proving and improving on the quality and quantity of care shown for that other, all keeping within the social and moral rules, non-consensual religious laws, and an obsolete legal system.

Can love remain true in the grip of cultural stereotypes, economic class, social rules, gender roles, and peer group expectations? How does love remain fluid and dynamic and alive once it is defined and categorized, and likewise, can perceptions shift from assumption to observation when behaviors change?

True love does not huddle one to the other that neither can see, it awakens the heart in a violent and unforgiving opening of the eye that does not just see what is in it's vision, but simultaneously feels all that it beholds and experiences all unconditionally. What to the eye is a smile to the heart may be pain, what to the ear sounds like laughter may be to the heart a crying child deep inside, what to the mouth shapes as song to the heart may feel like the passions of a forgotten longing. In Love, happiness is not preferable to sadness, pleasure to pain, activity to stillness, sleeping to waking, the ideal to the real, success to failure, winning to losing, all of the oppositions give way to the nothing that is everything and a knowing that can not be known. Yet, in this love, perhaps, if the cruel world does not get in the way too soon, you may get the chance to feel the bliss of true belonging in one another, of knowing the heart of another and in that love perceive the shared enlightening of your soul.

Having known a moment like this, how could love not expand and multiply and grow and fill every corner of the earth? The answer to this question is the one choice and the only one thing that we can have complete control over in this life, some have the courage to make it consciously, while many allow subconscious fears and desires to decide for them, all the time wondering how love could be so difficult, yet even more take love for granted, like winning a prize and believing it to be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, instead of answering its call to begin working together in life to heal humanity and nature.

How many times can the heart of a lover be broken in a lifetime, seemingly unconsolably, only to heal as if by magic at the touch of passion's torch, to at once cauterize and ignite the heart in familiar flames once again? Do I have the strength? Can I answer the question that would consecrate this knowledge to myself? Faced with this love I know to be true, do I have the strength and courage to believe that love is unconditional and divine, no matter my own suffering or of things not sacred, without doubt or fear accept with clarity the vision of ultimate reality as it exists, without the comfort of illusion or convenience of compromise, to walk the way of truth?

To have ever been in love, to experience the gift of knowing the divine only to doubt its existence is to make the choice to live in the ordinary and mundane that travels side by side with the experience of life as an unfolding dream of infinite possibilities and cosmic encounters. To love is to live in the uncertainty of all else but love itself, and to accept that even love itself as we understand it is not safe from the demands of love's own truth as it shifts and changes us even as we live it, suffer, burn, hurt, fly, fall, see, be, make love as it purifies us of all that is not essential until we are real, if we only make the conscious commitment to ourself to choose to live in love.