“Our work is to show we have been breathed upon — to show it, give it out, sing it out, to live out in the topside world what we have received through our sudden knowings, from body, from dreams and journeys of all sorts.”
Women Who…Estes, Ph.D.
I like this quote because it combines the inspiration of our emotions with the action of our intentions and doesn’t even once skip the bonds of love that require no emotion to be “real.”
A full day to do…on…with…it…
jrk
C.S. Lewis had an experience after the death of his wife described beautifully below. In it he details what I have experienced with some people in my life, experienced from a significant distance, a connectedness, a sense of being united though distinctly apart. My own experiences and this one thus described by Lewis with his deceased wife tell me we have much to learn about the connectedness of humanity as love and in love. It tells me we know so much with our language-dependent minds, we know so much that we have become ignorant where we need most to know intimately. We are dumbed-down by our reliance on more seemingly rational modes of connecting and communicating. And what follows hopefully describes what I mean here:
“It’s the quality of last night’s experience—not what it proves but what it was—that makes it worth putting down. It was quite incredibly unemotional. Just the impression of her mind momentarily facing my own. Mind, not “soul” as we tend to think of soul. Certainly the reverse of what is called “soulful.” Not at all like a rapturous reunion of lovers. Much more like getting a telephone call or a wire from her about some practical arrangement. Not that there was any “message” –just intelligence and attention. No sense of joy or sorrow. No love even, in our ordinary sense. No un-love. I had never in any mood imagined the dead as being so—well, so business-like. Yet there was an extreme and cheerful intimacy. An intimacy that had not passed through the sense or the emotions at all.
If this was a throw-up from my unconscious, then my unconscious must be a far more interesting region than the depth psychologists have led me to expect. For one thing, it is apparently much less primitive than my consciousness.
Wherever it came from, it has made a sort of spring cleaning in my mind. The dead could be like that; sheer intellects. A Greek philosopher wouldn’t have been surprised at an experience like mine. He would have expected that if anything of us remained after death it would be just that. Up to now this always seemed to me a most arid and chilling idea. The absence of emotion repelled me. But in this contact (whether real or apparent) it didn’t do anything of the sort. One didn’t need emotion. The intimacy was complete—sharply bracing and restorative too—without it. Can that intimacy be love itself—always in this life attended with emotion, not because it is itself an emotion, or needs an attendant emotion, but because our animal souls, our nervous systems, our imaginations, have to respond to it in that way? If so, how many preconceptions I must scrap! A society, a communion, of pure intelligences would not be cold, drab and comfortless. On the other hand it wouldn’t be very like what people usually mean when they use such words as “spiritual,” or “mystical,” or “holy.” It would, if I have had a glimpse, be—well, I’m almost scared at the adjectives I’d have to use. Brisk? cheerful? keen? alert? intense? wide-awake? Above all, solid. Utterly reliable. Firm. There is no nonsense about the dead. … What seemed to meet me was full of resolution.”
C.S. Lewis A Grief Observed
And there need be no nonsense about the alive, except the most seriously fun kind. What of this connection, this intimacy that could be love itself and that needs no words? Just how much do we actually know? And how much more alive would we be, more connected as thus described by Lewis and by my own experiences if we recognized that awareness and knowledge are two very different realities? Which one breathes the essence of intellect/soul into all we do and be? Which one grasps at an object and begs to retrieve what is already within? Awareness seems to be the step up from knowledge but doesn’t even require it. How much more potent the awareness when it is enriched by enlivened knowing?
Full of questions, no? What of emotion? How does it fit into resolution? The thing about emotion is that it takes us places, provokes, inspires to change, to choose and yet love is something independent of emotion. And it is profoundly connected to our intellect/intellgence in action. But now I ramble…
There’s more to know deeply, more to unity in love than we’ve begun to recognize. If we can get past the trap of thinking that the heights of rapturous emotion are the route to union and love, we’ll find a deeply feeling experience of ourselves as love and begin to connect to Source and to humanity on revolutionizing levels. We’ll make those connections that truly sustain.
On with it…
jruthkelly © 2008, 2009
My words are being used for classes drowning me in homework, essay preps and speeches down the road. Day two and I’ve spent an hour and a half running through the exercises for my Critical Thinking class.
I know it’s basic. But it takes time I had been using elsewhere. I find my creative flow is used up when I sit down to blog. Og og og… But I’m loving Fromm in my mini-breaks from homework (I love homework. Been doing it for over 2 decades but only within the constraints of my personal dictates.). He puts Freud in proper perspective and love in a place that is accessible, solid and without illusion. Not for the faint-hearted and a sure cure for narcissistic distortions.
So, since I’ve got to next focus on what I see unfolding for me in my Public Speaking class, Western World Lit – Advanced (omg, killing me after years of falling in love with the mind of the East) and Statistics, I’m tossing Fromm quotes on the table for “fun.” These are speaking to me lately since I tend to rant about love and quote greats on love and nowhere do I try to identify what it is (as if! cough…). I see, know and experience love on spiritual levels that play out on the solid physical planes of existence and my ability to put it into words that adequately conveys is lacking. I tend to go off on poetic rambles useful only to myself. Fromm, on the other hand, has mastered the best definition I have yet to find or create. To start with, he slices and dices at what love is NOT:
“Automatons cannot love; they can exchange their ‘personality packages’ and hope for a fair bargain.”
“Love is not the result of adequate sexual satisfaction, but sexual happiness–even the knowlede of the so-called sexual technique–is the result of love…The study of the most frequent sexual problems…shows that the cause does not lie in a lack of knowledge of the right technique, but in the inhibitions which make it impossible to love.”
“Love as mutual sexual satisfaction, and love as ‘teamwork’ and as a haven from aloneness, are the two ‘normal’ forms of the disintegration of love in modern Western society, the socially patterned pathology of love.”
“Another form of pseudo-love is what may be called ‘sentimental love.’ Its essence lies in the fact that love is experienced only in phantasy and not in the here-and-now relationship to another person who is real…As long as love is a daydream, they [lovers/partners] can participate; as soon as it comes down to the reality of the relationship between two real people–they are frozen.”
And here’s my favorite identification of what love IS:
“Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence, hence if each one of them experiences himself from the center of his existence. Only in this ‘central experience’ is human reality, only here is aliveness, only here is the basis for love.
Love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place[!!!], but a moving, growing, working together; even whether there is harmony or conflict, joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are one with each other by being one with themselves [emphasis mine], rather than by fleeing from themselves. There is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned; this is the fruit by which love is recognized.”
These all come from Fromm’s awesome book, The Art of Loving. And I’ve likely already put it on this blog. Maybe not. But it’s worth embracing, revolutionizing a life intent on knowing and being known in love, as love, for love, by love…you get it.
jrk
While in Georgia visiting family and friends, my sister, children, nephew and I travelled to our favorite Tallulah River spot. We got there just in time for the rains. It was a first for us, to get there and be rained out. But we changed our agenda and ventured away from the typical routine, ending up at Tallulah Gorge in a great store with the perfect lookout spot.
Tallulah’s my place. It’s where my ashes will flow, where my heart sings and my spirit finds deep resonance with the Divine, with a vibrant vitality indestructible.
. . . faith in the evidence of humanity’s consistent (not denying the presence of tumult, of fatal error, of ugly flaws) efforts to find the most effective expressions of love and all the bumps along the way, all the faulty notions of love melting in the heat of failures horrific whose edges brutally eliminate illusions and distortions of love. Love as something other than a trumped-up scam of exploitation and manipulation. Love as something whispering of the value of every pulse of human experience, of all those ideals that support that very value, of all that supports, nurtures and defends the preciousness of one life and one life’s right to autonomous expression in harmony with the earth.
From his book “The Art of Loving” Erich Fromm speaks:
“I am of the conviction that the answer of the absolute incompatibility of love and ‘normal’ life is correct only in an abstract sense. The principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love are incompatible. But modern society seen concretely is a complex phenomenon. A salesman of a useless commodity, for instance, cannot function economically without lying; a skilled worker, a chemist, or physician can. Similarly, a farmer, a worker, a teacher, and many a type of businessman can try to practice love without ceasing to function economically. Even if one recognizes the principle of capitalism as being incompatible with the principle of love, one must admit that ‘capitalism’ is in itself a complex and constantly changing structure which still permits of a good deal of non-conformity and of personal latitude.
In saying this, however, I do not wish to imply that we can expect the present social system to continue indefinitely, and at the same time to hope for the realization of the ideal of love for one’s brother. People capable of love, under the present system, are necessarily exceptions; love is by necessity a marginal phenomenon in present-day Western society. Not so much because many occupations would not permit of a loving attitude, but because the spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only the non-conformist can defend himself successfully against it. Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon…Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves. All activities are subordinated to economic goals, means have become ends; man is an automaton–well fed, well clad, but without any ultimate concern for that which is peculiarly human quality and function. If man is to be able to love, he must be put in his supreme place. The economic machine must serve him, rather than he serve it. He must be enabled to share experience, to share work, rather than, at best, share in profits. Society must be organized in such a way that man’s social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature. Indeed, to speak of love is not ‘preaching,’ for the simple reason that it means to speak of the ultimate and real need in every human being. That this need has been obscured does not mean that it does not exist. To analyze the nature of love is to discover its general absence today and to criticize the social conditions which are responsible for this absence. To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of man.”
And here we have the only and best reasonable faith. And it encompasses all the expressions of the human condition, the very best of those expressions: the ones free of fear.
Erich Fromm is probably my biggest hero of the soul. I’d love to go back in time and beg he find a way to make sure his legacy heal our world today. But as it turns out, the legacy is ancient and hard-wired into the marrow of what it is to be human. We’re truly capable of making love, no matter our ethnicity, our citizenry or our spiritual proclivities. The river of a sustenance eternal, defying every exclusive claim by philosophical and religious dogma, flows through the soul of humanity. We’re long overdue on the only worthwhile restoration. . .
Yesterday a man knocked on my door. I’d seen him going door to door in my neighborhood. I’d noted, impressed with his great greeting etiquette, that he rang the doorbell and immediately stepped off my neighbor’s front porch, waiting well out of reach of the door. It’s a pet peeve of mine, the whole door dumbness routine. You don’t knock on my door, a total stranger, and then stand smack up against the safety zone of the door as I open it to say “hello,” making a crowded and awkward collision of intention. If you know consideration, if you know thoughtfulness, you stand back and well out of the way and you show yourself fully from a distance appropriate. You give space. You make it clear that you respect a person’s home and the obviousness of your status as completely unknown. (But I’m not at all opinionated about this.) In any case, you’re doing well to get me to come to the door at all if I don’t know you. I have the same attitude about telephones. This guy had my attention. His body language was confident but something. I couldn’t pin it down. He didn’t have the dress or demeanor of a salesman. He looked like he was declaring something and his aura, his energy communicated something noble. Can a person look noble from a distance? So it seems. But I was curious. So, when my doorbell rang I chose not to pretend to be unavailable. I wanted to see if his greeting stance would be consistent.
He waited well within range of my vision. I was impressed, wanting to ask him to give lessons to all doorbell hopefuls. I noted as I opened the door that a family van was parked in front of my home. He introduced himself and let me know he and his wife, who was waiting in the van, had been laid off from their jobs. “Is there any work we can do for whatever you might be able to give? We could paint your house number on the curb.” I asked how much he would charge, thinking it a cool coincidence that I’d just noted the lack of a house number on the curb, once again, the same morning, wishing for an easy solution. “We’ll take whatever…$10? We’re hurting.” “Well, $10 is all I have actually and that’ll be great. Thank you.” He was amazed, his head doing that shocked jerk heads do when they’re about to turn away and go down the sidewalk with a frustrated body to the next house. His wife was amazed. I was thrilled.
The previous week I’d felt “led” to get $10 cash out. I’m paying attention to my intuition more than ever. A couple times I had opportunities to burn through the cash. But my gut said no. So, no. When he said “$10” my gut said “yes!” Sounds silly. But I don’t have cash on hand around here. Cash has a way of evaporating, proving the old adage about pennies saved and earned and not doing much for college funds or paint for house numbers on a curb. Oh wait…
Why bring this up? Why share? Why does it even matter, this whole “led” thing? It was such a wonderful feeling, to realize I’d opened the door in my heart before I opened the door literally. When I saved the $10, I was preparing for that moment without any truly logical proof of a great reason to do so. Intuition is such nourishing goodness. It, when carried through on the wings of “happenstance,” fills the soul with appreciation, thankfulness. Intuition thrives on hope and hope thrives sometimes when it makes very little sense. We all need hope. And courage. Courage to risk the seeming loss of face for trusting a process that has no hard and fast guarantees.
Knock on doors? Ask if you can do any house or yard work? Go door to door in your Dodge Caravan and point to your wife and stand there and declare shamelessly your need? Get $10 out for a gut feeling and hoard it like some old maid miser? I don’t do cash. I don’t do old maid miser. Do I? Say it isn’t so. No, it isn’t. If cash sits stashed in my purse, it’s gone as soon as a child has a wish. And that is often and fun!
But I have my house number on the curb now. Had I not had the $10, I wouldn’t. Had I not noted the sense of being “led” it would’ve been gone by the time my doorbell rang. And he’d not have had a surprising $10 moment. Besides, I found another dollar. He and his wife got $11 for the work. I wanted to give them a meal and jobs. You know what I appreciated more than numbers on a curb? The brief conversing with the couple, the firm handshake and receiving a verbal blessing: “God bless you.” I’ll take God’s blessing any day.
That’s the other thing. Much like an odd appearance on my front step complete with thoughtful regard for my boundaries, I’m discovering the emergence in my soul of a new appreciation for the mother and father heart of God, a God I began to give up on 10 years ago. I don’t really know this God though. S/he is not insisting on any religion or proof of existence. She wants to iron out details and make things new and paint numbers out of the blue. He wants to affirm hope and make a way where there seems not to be one.
My gut is telling me the timing couldn’t be better. And it was a perfect prelude to my walk across campus to pay, in person, for the fall semester of my second year of college at the age of 41. A 22 year gap in education (formal, that is!) found tremendous renewal today. There was no way I was going to do the payment over the phone. This had to be done in person, with son by my side. I wasn’t going to NOT go to school this fall though every fact and figure said otherwise. As it turns out, life responded with timely provision – just enough and at just the right moment.
I like details. And I like how life affirms us when we decide to dance with hope and courage. It births a nobility in the mean streets of loss and opens doors for all of us.
Life is good. Between the falls and fasts, feasts and laughter there are 3 children and more joy than I expected in such simplicity. I don’t understand the naysayers declaring my boys would not want to hug me in public (or otherwise) once they reached a certain age. They were wrong. I’m accosted on a daily basis. And when I do the accosting, it’s met with the sweetest welcome. My daughter spent hours repairing my favorite purse yesterday on the tailend of a weekend of standing watch over my drugged and bruised frame – at her insistence and with pleasure. And this was her second weekend of taking care. I’ve been that flattened by falls and extractions! The highlight of our day unfolded in my room in a pile of beautiful dresses and garments handmade by my mom too many moons ago. Marion got to pour her own light into their threads. Some things MUST be kept, if only to see the pleasure. The value is anything but practical.
And all of it bowls me over. Yes, it’s been painful. But has anyone else noticed? This is heaven. This and the myriad wonders ’round the bend. Why would we seek for a beyond, a tide to come, to bring reason to pain or loss when the only reason to anything is that we can make a feast of the moment in love, with our works, with our sewing, our hugging, our tending. It’s the guarantee of a heaven that creates a stupor of apathy, of self-deception posing comfort for losses, losses nothing, not one thing can justify. There is no such thing as compensation for any one thing. As if(!), as if it were possible.
There is only what is priceless now.
And the long walk on the beach with one of your big-hearted sons in tidal pools telling time, marking paradise for the richest paupers poising in the sand, making eternity drip drop stop and wait, ebb and flow at our feet. . .
“The whole purpose of the symbol and the mythos, which is the system of symbols, is to lead us to God himself, just as the purpose of language is to convey meaning and not mere words. God–Meaning alike of the universe and the mythos–is alive; like wind, like moving waters, like fire, he cannot be grasped in some rigid form. Thus the symbolic form conveys the life of God as the acorn conveys an oak. In time, if the acorn is alive, its shell will burst; the living tree will grow out of it, and refuse to be enclosed in a shell any more. Likewise, God gives his life to men in symbols and sacraments, but if that life is to be truly lively, it will not stay confined in those forms or in any others. It will use forms; it will express itself in forms; but it will not be held in forms.”
Alan Watts – Behold the Spirit
The beauty of this truth expressed here lies in the reality of dynamic possibility. Each person can take from what s/he feels of, thinks of and experiences of God or even simply hopes to experience and from those rich layers gestate a relationship with the Divine.
The work of weeding out the toxic threads provided by misguided spiritual leaders is paramount to a truly authentic walk with Spirit. And at some point the idea of “with” fades as the life as separate from God becomes more and more inconceivable. A steady path to that point is one of consistent effort, and of awareness of self, recognition of cultural influences and gender-focused obstructions.
Some of us have to run in the direction of the devil for a season in order to get a feel for where we stand in our hearts and minds, where we stand with “god” and without “god” and in order to determine what of previously held beliefs have dismantled vital soulful being. An example of the many possible considerations poses itself in this question: How did a masculine god-view damage your sense of the empowered woman?
The truth is: we are not and never have been separate from the Divine or from love and after a while we recognize there is no distinction between those two.
jruthkelly © 2008, 2009
“There is something that is overt and
hidden,
That exists beyond heaven and earth.
Formless, motionless,
It stands alone, forever, it does not change,
It exists in every place, it never tires.
It can be called ‘Mother of the universe,’
Because I don’t know its name.
If I am compelled to call it by a name,
I will call it Tao, ‘all-embracing.’
‘All-embracing’ exists forever,
‘All-embracing’ is far-reaching,
‘All-embracing’ returns to every beginning.
Therefore Tao is ‘all-embracing,’
Heaven is ‘all-embracing,’
Earth is ‘all-embracing,’
Man is ‘all-embracing,’
In the universe, four things are ‘all-
embracing,’
And man is one of them.
Man adheres to the laws of earth,
Earth adheres to the laws of heaven,
Heaven adheres to the laws of Tao,
Tao adheres to the laws of its nature.”
Lao Tzu – Tao Te Ching
If tomorrow I finish the final chapter
Of the book I started 5 years ago
And the next day
I die, then why?
Why bother?
Because every ounce of effort is pure love
Pure being, pure human pulse and
beauty in motion and because, because
this is true of all people whether
Or not
They grace the who’s who of beauty and truth…
Or die quietly in a cancer wing
never known by the masses.
What is true? We are love.
If today I start the next section of my garden
and plan the plotting of the best green revolution
and then die in two weeks,
why bother? What’s the point?
The point is love and…
love doesn’t die. Every ounce of love showing
the uniqueness of one life as love, of love, for love is a spiritual
investment in generations to come
even if it’s “merely” the plotting of petunias on a hillside or
the move from an oppressive relationship into solitude.
That’s why you put one foot in front and then the other.
That’s why you hold up a standard in the face of destruction.
That’s why you define what life is about for you…
so love can find that much more opportunity
to manifest herself
himself
all
in a never-ending song of being love
in spite of the towering fists, the showering acid and
the brutality taunting, suggesting the futility of life itself.
Love bothers.
j. ruth kelly © 2008
