“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
--Ursula K. LeGuin
Regardless of gender, race or creed: attraction, lust, capture, consummation . . . then what? The greed slaked is supplanted by mechanics of ordinary life and friendship supersedes in time, as in “. . for better or worse, sickness and health . .”
I knew a man who, like myself, had a child in distress. His council was correct: Tough Love, abandon wishful/magical thinking, engage the problem with all objective resources available. --(derived) His child was misdiagnosed and died leaving him with bills to pay and three jobs. I cannot remember the incident giving birth to the topic but he defined marriage as: “A daily renewable bond.” I intuit his marriage prevailed while mine is no more. Being a failure in relationship I have chosen to remain celibate yet richer than my most extravagant avarice for wealth in sex or money or power through friendship. In some sense it is like Sex Addicts admonition extended from 100 to 1,001 ‘dates.’
How would my ideal work in real time flesh and blood for others? I haven’t a clue yet celebrate the “not dying wondering.” My urge to merge waning and personal choice to not use another for mere pleasure defines my transition from adolescence at seventy-years-of-age. But then I am merely curious as to what and why I do every or anything . . . and I watch people closely, individually, corporately and communally.
Another way of defining what I conclude is to say that laws in general are more often against than for. They defend status quo at the expense of transformation. Lamentably I have found no vessel to contain my love; neither personal nor institutional save that in the energy I call Beloved Friend. Who seems to spread my small drop of oily life upon the modest communal surrounding me in this life. The metaphor meaning to still the turbulent waters of our time--one-by-one in intimate relationship.
In solitude I sometimes fall into the abyss. Awakening from slumber, not so much a blank slate, as absolutely nothing. Yet in unspoken covenant discover the Mother/Father Friend who catches me . . . would that I were so noble as my thoughts in flesh and blood reality. I am impaled upon the last words of Jesus, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Emily Dickinson and Gandhi. In their words and deeds I sense where I long to be: reverent to myself, mate, friend and enemy. Fully at peace with unknowing. Unity and completion is only potential in ourselves individually our relationships are from my vantage like two galaxies separate but drawn neigh. I know heaven is within us. Merged we may save life from extinction on this our nest.
120401 09:45 Addendum discovered this date:
" The curse which lies upon marriage is that too often the individuals are joined in their weakness rather than in their strength, each asking from the other instead of finding pleasure in giving. It is even more deceptive to dream of gaining through the child a plenitude, a warmth, a value, which one is unable to create for oneself; the child brings joy only to the woman who is capable of disinterestedly desiring the happiness of another, to one who without being wrapped up in self seeks to transcend her own existence." --Simone de Beauvoir
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