I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz,
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as one loves certain obscure things,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries
the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself,
and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose
from the earth lives dimly in my body.
I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you directly without problems or pride:
I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love,
except in this form in which I am not nor are you,
so close that your hand upon my chest is mine,
so close that your eyes close with my dreams.
Pablo Neruda
I walked up the door,
shut the stairs,
said my shoes,
took off my prayers,
turned off my bed,
got into the light,
all because
you kissed me goodnight.
Just Because by Natalie Dorsch
Life…
The thing about life is, that you must fall in love with it, you must start perceive it, as lovers perceive each other — with tenderness and awareness of every detail, with enthusiasm and expectation of every moment. To spend this time here is great reward; our life offering us so much possibilities, about which we’re totally unaware, while being trapped in our everyday thoughts, which seems so important, but in reality are so insignificant.
In life, just like in love, is nothing to win and nothing to find, but just to experience. The greatness of being in love is the simplicity, the melting of what we’re calling reality, but actually what’s happening, is just melting of our everyday ideas, which are mostly based on fear, and therefore are mostly negative. There’s nothing but love or fear, so when we fall in love, our ideas emerge from love, and therefore, they’re not just positive, but actually limitless.
Falling in love with life, means simply that our perception emerge from love, instead from fear. To put it more simply, it means: when we fall in love with life, life fall in love with us.
To have a good life, I think, we must love it - just like, to have a good relationship, we must love the person with which we’re in relationship. We must be forgiving, patient, and mostly understanding. The recipe for good life, I think, is the same as for good relationship, but that’s not coincidence, since what is life, if not the most important relationships of all - the relationship with ourselves, with God, with universe.
The Relationship
First of first, I believe love should be part of relationship, however, love is much wider than the relationship itself. I actually see quite a lot of selfishness and limitations (+hate,jealousy,etc..) in many relationships, while I consider love to be wide, open and pure, as I wrote about it in one of my previous posts.
We could imagine relationship as soup, and love is water. So it’s (main) ingredient, but it’s quite modified, and mixed with other things. When it comes to relationship, the biggest problem is understanding what relationship should be, and our ideas about it, are really quite strange; relationship based on such a ideas easily fail, even if it had potential in the beginning.
To be single (for longer period of time) is very often considered as some kind of curse, and single person, feels like a big failure. Very often, people consider single person as odd, and above all, as unhappy. Can relationship equals happiness, and can being single, be worst than being in bad relationship? I think answer to both is NO.
Is it true that, no matter how unhappy you are in the relationship, it can’t be worst than being single? Well, it doesn’t make sense to me. Relationship of two persons, with such a strange ideas, must turn into something awful and frightening, after all, they both were (at least partly) pushed into it because of fear of being single (and fear of being odd, unhappy, etc..)
Many people wrongly understand world “single”, they confuse it with word “alone”; that’s not correct of course, being single isn’t the same as being alone. Being single is just not being in relationship, while being alone, is being on your own (no people around you whatsoever, no friends, - nothing). Furthermore, thing that cause even greater confusion is (conscious or subconscious) mixing of words “alone” and “lonely”, which leading into wrongly believing that “single” equals “lonely” — and of course, no one wanna feel lonely.
But, I’m thinking, being in a bad relationship, where the other person doesn’t consider you, the relationship in which you constantly feel ignored, - isn’t that even worst than feeling lonely? For good (healthy) relationship, which won’t bring pain and frustration into our life, we must first learn to be single.
To be single
To be single, it’s not something that we need to fix, it’s not limitation whatsoever. We can fully function while single, and mostly important, we can be happy.
The first thing we must be aware of, is that being single it’s totally fine, and that the relationship won’t bring any salvation. We absolutely must start consider ourselves as individual person, which is able to survive and being happy without relationship.
As we realize mentioned things, and actually consider ourselves as such, we can stop seeking for someone, and we can dedicate time, to our life - to develop it, to realize who we are and where we’re going. In other words, to grow and to be alive. We must fill our life, and when we’re going into the relationship, we must bring this fullness with us.
The relationship
When we start the relationship, even if we came full into it, we very soon give our life to the other person, we often merge it too much. The good relationship is such, in which two persons living their own life, the dependence which is happening, should be only subtle, there shouldn’t be dependence which emotionally or physically prevents one to leave, at any given moment. From that perspective, we can understand relationship as friendship, and above all, that’s how relationship should be.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
— Kahlil Gibran
I don’t believe there’s one right person for which we should wait, or which we supposed to find. Once someone said to me: “in this big city, lives so many men, how can I ever find the right one?”, I believe, there’s not one right person among millions of wrong persons, - I believe there’s just a million chances.
To believe in one right person, is quite narrow minded and limiting, and above all it may become very frustrating, when we realize that the persons for which we believed it’s the right one, turns out to be wrong. We suffer, and we very wrongly believe, there won’t be another like he/she was.
What I really enjoy is not you; it’s something that’s greater than both you and me. It is something that I discovered, a kind of symphony, a kind of orchestra that plays one melody in your presence, but when you depart, the orchestra doesn’t stop. When I meet someone else, it plays another melody, which is also very delightful. And when I’m alone, it continues to play. There’s a great repertoire and it never ceases to play. — Anthony de Mello
From the same reason I don’t believe in marriage. Marriage is contract, and doesn’t offer anything, nor love, nor permanency. Nowadays it’s very easy to get divorce, so it’s not even any insurance that two will stay together, and most important, it’s not insurance that two will understand each other, and that they’ll be able to live together happily.
Him that I love, I wish to be free — even from me. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh
The relationship, is walking on some path together, and when that path split, both should go into their own way.
The life of person, the personal development and happiness, it’s more important than the relationship. The relationship should be tool, the helping to achieve mentioned things, but never obstacle. I don’t have in mind, that things should be perfect all the time, but I do believe that we all sense, very soon (not after years of suffering, but much sooner) that things doesn’t work anymore. In that case, our duty is to leave. To free ourselves, and to free the persons with which we’re in the relationship. — And if we love that person? — If we truly love that person, then we won’t even think about it, we’ll leave immediately.
How about trying to fix things first? — I believe in fixing and dialog, and when that’s possible, things aren’t so messy anyway. But sometimes (often), things can’t be solved with talking, in many cases we have monologue rather than dialog. The best thing in such case it leaving. Not hating, not threatening, just simply - leaving. Our life isn’t subjected to anyone, our life is too short to waste it on any drama, therefore, when we find ourselves in drama, we should escape it. We don’t have to run, but we do have to terminate it. Spend yeas for fixing something, that hardly ever worked, makes no sense at all. No matter good or bad, relationship is a chance to grow. Even if your relationship is totally messed, there’s still some message in it, something important to learn, maybe you need learn to leave, or learn to survive on your own.
Don’t see just the relationship, but above all, chance for something great, something above you and your partner, something - that brought you two together, even if into a bad relationship. But don’t insist for the sake of relationship, or because of the fear of being alone (or lonely), put that energy into the realization, into seeing what’s there to see.
Love is….
Not so long ago I heard a song about love, in it was one verse, saying: “love is pain”; it’s commonly accepted nowadays, that love is pain, suffering, fear. We really can read about that everywhere, we can see that in movies, we can hear that in a lot of songs. That’s so real for us, that we think, we actually feel it: “ohh, I’m crying now, because of love”.
There is really a lot of things, a lot of emotions, wrongly associated with love. For example: is love fear? It isn’t, of course not; can I feel pain, because of love? I can’t - of course not. Love is: just love, it’s simple and positive. Fear, is another emotion (or state of mind), which may appear in company of love, but it isn’t love. Just like I’m not someone with who I enter the room, or in other words, if two persons enter my room - one really good, positive and nice, and other violent, annoying and negative, are those two persons one? Well, I think the answer is obvious: of course NOT!
However, love doesn’t come in company of fear, neither in company of pain or suffering, as much as in company of desire. There’s a lot of cases, a lot states which are actually completely without love, - there’s just desire, but we wrongly perceive it, as the greatest love of our life.
Desire causing suffering. As we desire someone, who we can’t have, or as we desire something, that actually even doesn’t exists, we’re generating a lot of suffering, a lot of pain. And when our desire isn’t fulfilled, it’s growing, and growing, and with this growing desire, we’re experiencing more and more pain, and we’re suffering more and more. But, we can’t blame love, right? Love isn’t connected to that at all, actually, love is quite opposite, we can’t suffer because of someone, who we truly love.
Now, there is another strange idea about love: that love can’t exist without desire. This idea is just as wrong as the idea, that we can’t be happy without money. But the fact it, that true happiness exists, out of boundaries of materialistic world. Money is more obstacle than advantage in being truly happy. The same is with love, real love, isn’t in boundaries of desire, it isn’t even associated with desire, and desire is just an obstacle on achieving real love.
Real love, isn’t something someone feel towards one special person, but it’s general. Real love, isn’t divided between people, but it’s core feeling, and it can be in every relationship. Actually, towards more persons we feel it, more real it is; or in other words: more we’re loving, more love we have. More we’re reserving love for just one special person, for just one categorical relationship, less love we have, and less real that love is.
Love actually isn’t something we would feel because of someone, but it’s just something we feel.
Love is core, of every good relationship, either is it between man and woman, between parent and child or between friends. In different cases it’s accompaniment by different emotions, and in different type of relationships, we’re doing different activities - while we don’t have sex with friends, we have it with our partner; but the love is core and it’s the same emotion in both cases.
So, we’re very unfair, when blaming love for our suffering. I think, it’s even dangerous to blame love, since if we do so, we start growing some fears and misconceptions about love; we’re also totally failing to see the true cause of our suffering.
To conclude: love is one emotion (it isn’t divided), and it’s pointed towards more people, it’s always positive, and it’s separated off other emotions. Love is growing, the more we’re sharing it. More we’re saving our love, for certain circumstances, less love we’re able to give, and less pure that love is.
Encounter
The tough day has finished. Everything I want to do now, is to lie down, to take a book and to read. I started to think about the content of it, can I comprehend it?
The sky is grey and the clock is showing almost three, it seems more though, seems like evening actually. Snowflakes are twirling in a soft but very cold wind, I like it, even though it’s very cold.
I’m at the parking place where only my car is parked, all around is emptiness. I think that’s strange, on another day and at the same time, this parking place would be totally full.
I drop those thoughts, as rage has arisen in me, because the car’s lock has failed again. Just in the moment, when my thoughts are the darkest, I see someone is approaching, and all the anger has melted away. I breath in and turn around, raise my head up to see the face of the person standing near me; it’s a girl, her face is pretty and so familiar, I know her but as usually I don’t know from where.
I recognize her in a moment, when she in question say my name. Actually, I more than just recognize her - the whole past, all moments we spent together flash in front of my eyes. I can’t understand why I haven’t recognized her at once.
“It’s seven years since that”, she just ended the summary of our last meeting, as we’re walking towards a Caffè. All the moments I spent with her, are now so alive in my mind, and I actually can’t believe so much time has passed.
The caffè is really nice, it’s warm and cosy and we’re almost alone in it. We’re sitting facing each other, and I can finally really look into her face. She has changed, but yet she’s the same. I realize that she has green eyes, and I wonder if I always knew that, or have I realized it just now.
I withdraw my look, and direct it through the window, where the passing car has just drawn a silhouette of an old man, which is hardly moving alone though the wind and snow. I look at her again, and now I see the smile on her face, the reason of which, I can’t explain to myself. After some moments her smile has faded away, I want to see it again so I try to smile, and I hope she’ll reflect it.
I have no idea how much time has passed, maybe an hour or two, or maybe even more? It’s completely dark outside. When I want to look through the window, I can see only clear reflection of myself and her in it. I try to understand the beauty of being, which is sitting in front of me. We were walking on similar paths, we were making similar decisions, and we believed and still do in similar things. We both see life through the same eyes: stars and mornings, snowflakes, warm tea, day dreaming, autumn leaves whirling in soft wind, fog colored by the light of the sunrise, life and love. All those magical things.
I’m not aware of time anymore, we’re outside now, the wind is blowing stronger, it has stopped snowing and the sky has cleared up. I don’t feel cold, as we’re standing in front of each other and saying goodbye. We’re looking into each others’ eyes, and we’re waiting for something to happen.
It was just couple of seconds maybe, though it seemed like an eternity.
Now I’m in the car, which stared moving slowly. In my thoughts it’s sill her last smile, and for a moment I feel like I’m not alone. The world starts to melt away, night lights, stars and the moon, they all merge into one, like they’d always be one.
