Love is Complicated: A Brief Meditation
Unlearning What I’ve Learned About Love
As read on the Earth Makers podcast, Season 3.6.
Love is complicated. Now, as I write this, it is Valentine’s Day in the year 2021 and I am thinking about the many layers of what we might call, in the English, “love.”
Love, according to the Ancient Greeks was of four distinct kinds: erotic and sensual love (Eros), love of a comrade or partner-in-arms (Phileo), familial love (Storge), and unconditional, perfect love (Agape).
The first three seem perfectly reasonable and uniquely human. I teach an entire workshop on the spiritual value of love within the human experience for the purposes of connection. I conduct premarital counseling sessions for couples seeking out the commitment of a marriage. You would think I’d have this shit respectably nailed down.
I do not have the very human expressions of love “nailed down.” Trying to figure this (Love) out is, perhaps, not the call of the sentient being. I am getting cross at myself and those I love for not explaining to me how to love better and well, I tried, right?
I tried, as Auden eloquently writes, “And said it wouldn’t do.”
I have exhausted myself in the area of Eros, like a dog addicted to her master’s chicken sandwiches, panting and pacing restlessly at the locked gate.
With Phileo, I have attempted to force the appearance of heading in the same direction as my energetic peers…only to find myself wearing a heavier mask than most.
Storge has wounded me deeper than any love. What is family? Who gets to choose? What of shared genetics? We know shared genetics are no guarantee of love. If “blood is thicker than water,” why is it that it flows so freely from out of my wounded heart when I am forced to contend with the image my family of origin has constructed of me, a statue fixed in a nearly permanent, unmovable state? We do this, don’t we? We set people in a mold and we fucking leave them there.
This will not do.
So, then there’s this whole Agape concept. It is perfect in the spirit of “teleos,” a goal that I can see and am on my way toward. I am always in a state of arrival, but never fully arriving. I cannot rest. I can see the moon in my telescope (do you see teleos in telescope?) and I can’t seem to get the funding to get there. What does it take to blast off to the moon?
The astronauts and scientists won’t even take me seriously.
Then there’s the Love of which we dare not speak. Love of self. A damning love, a freeing love. A caress of a heart. A pleading with the gut not to explode under the sheer weight of panic and shame.
Don’t even get me started on that shit.
So, how do we do this “Love” thing well?
I defer to my Buddhist master, my own personal Master Yoda.
Perhaps to engage in caring relationships, even with all their flaws and fears, is to love well. You will love and you will try and you will sweat and you will groan and you will grieve, and pace, and reason, bargain, beg, plead, blow up and build back again. You will feel softness and rough friction. It’s just the cosmos, isn’t it? Stardust shit.
Can you fail at love? No. Can you fail at trying to fit the molds others have set for you? Yes. Be careful not to trap yourself in said mold, okay? For of what benefit would it be to stay trapped in a mold and lose your soul in the process?
Auden asks of love:
Does it look like a pair of pyjamas,
Or the ham in a temperance hotel?
Does its odour remind one of llamas,
Or has it a comforting smell?
Is it prickly to touch as hedge is,
Or soft as eiderdown fluff?
Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges,
O tell me the truth about love.
The answer is yes, Auden. A ringing, resounding, virtuosic YES throughout all time and space. It is all of these things. And we are both all of these things and none of these things, my love.
There is only one common question Love asks of all beings,
How will you live with your YES, today?
