Musing on Love

Antonio Butts – Red Woman

I might have let it go, these automatic writing bursts I have from time to time but recent challenges have urged me to try to understand what we mean when we speak loftily or basically about Love. And despite this urgency I would have tried to let it go – accept that the expression and understanding is simply in the experience – a thing one can’t always explain but I received news yesterday that my ex-husband had died. He was 48. Ours had been a brief and seriously troubled marriage. I had loved him but could not help him as I had hoped. There was joy at the outset and as our youth would allow us to display. But he was tortured and seemed deep down to despise joy. His soul seemed to yearn for former tragedies as though these were defining to him. The morning I heard the news of his passing I had mused a little on love as here follows. I can’t attribute this to him, but certainly to a moment that has reared so much of the past I thought was somewhere far behind me, but is yet near and always present. It is also about the constancy of the absorbing Power of love – without which our lives mean nothing.

“Love is a divine Mystery…”
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Love reveals its magnificence in the intersection of Pain and Joy. It is uncompromising in force and its will to perpetuate itself. Its design is never destructive – purposeful, deliberate but not destructive. It seeks always to reconnect disparities of emotions along the journey. It will generate pain and hurt but I don’t think it’s wilful but those natural propensities within it enable that appreciation of joy. The kind of joy that lasts as long as a wish and certainly not forever. It’s an unseen, formidable power and ungraspable by ordinary or mundane impulses. One must strive for it through channels of mediation – I suppose – and one’s readiness therein to explore its secret mystery. Love is neither end nor beginning as gestures sometimes convey. It’s neither intermittent nor eternal – meaning it’s not some kind of static thing. It is flux – but not whimsical either as it might seem. It is bold courage and fragile opposition to that. It is the experience of aliveness and loneliness. It’s a great and worst secret. It elevates self-mastery and for that unceasing in its accommodations. It is some kind of yearning, deep and high. Whether Pain or Joy, love cannot be avoided. That would be a woeful digression of our capacity. It cannot be avoided for comfort, sentiment nor some easy superficial life. Love – I think is about the capacity to experience life in fullness – I really don’t mean this sentimentally but essentially. It’s the Will to overcome, no matter how severe the degrees of torments castrating efforts of becoming, of being, of creating. And actually standing out or away from familiars, distinguishing the self in the sum of those dear to you. It is the force that denies wilful oppressions of the Soul. And so perhaps we might accept it as the Soul’s comforter, harmonising complex experiences of erring digressions much to our ego’s delight. It’s no easy contest – any permeable denial of love. Eventually one must yield to it, this is the erstwhile challenge and beauty – why not – of love. I don’t mean to formulate delusions about it – it’s not perfection – that too is sentiment and folly. But I sense it is some type of accumulated and collective experience humanity has ever endured. It’s not desperate, nor simply Divine. Love is the Power that makes anything advance, especially for the spiritual creative – since that is God-directed – and so manifests the quality of its Diviness – and I’d venture why it has endured. There can be no experience without struggle – where one assumes only postures of smiles and laughter. In fullness love is a boundless transmission and replete with solutions otherwise overlooked by careless observation. In those frequencies of Joy one experiences a transforming emblem of light mediated in the channel through which love soars. That light must be activated in the mode of intuitive Wisdom and Peace – for I think it’s there the sanctity of love takes form – not only form but from here it also derives its strength. Love and Truth are variables of this lasting light – they are the arbiters of balance and harmony. The ‘Divine Mystery’ of love then is a Commanding Power enabling facets of individuated experiences that articulate collective extremes. The All – the God-sign rebounds from it, regenerates its dynamic to give generously of Itself. Love is therefore an unlimited source as many philosophers and artists have always expressed. Love, I say cannot be denied nor avoided no matter how wilful its attempts to hurt. It is Pain, it is Joy, it is experience, it is life. It is everything, and I cannot say finally that I’ve found any meaningful way to live my life without the particularities of this Power.

Antonia Butts – ‘Man’

Art of Akan David