CARVING RELATIONSHIPS AND LOVE, ACTUALLY.
I was hiking a favorite trail at Manley Park that has four wooden bridges that repeatedly cross a rushing mountain stream as one climbs. I paused on one to admire the familiar but always beautiful sight below and above, and spotted something quite new: the old romantic carving on the railing had been rather suddenly and crudely revised! [see photo] Ah, how relationships change and shock us! That inspired this note on love:
As children, you and I learn to see what we are told, trained, and culturally taught to believe is the world. And of course, we carry that into all relationships, including those ‘falling in and out of love’ dramas. While we’re under the assumption of being a person who loves, there’s bound to be lots of exceptions to that, lots of challenges to what you and/or the ‘loved’ other thought and believed, unless and until someone changed and found, sooner or later, they were deceived – perhaps by the other, but most often, by one’s own hopes and fears. Ah, the troubles and trials of love are never-ending, yes? Well, no, perhaps if one brings the light of deep inner self-knowing first to oneself and then to outer relationships, one may find what love is and isn’t; that knowing may guide and enrich all of the events in one’s daily life. So what is love? Is it personal, a feeling?
That ‘conditioning’ referred to above comes from the dualizing binary mind and the personal ‘experience‘ of its either/or thinking, i.e., good/bad, right/wrong, like/dislike, etc. In directly seeing that one’s own conditioned mind cannot, and does not, know much about love other than sentimentally rendered feelings, one may happen upon the deceptive workings of the mind. It’s a brain activity which – only apparently – separates, divides, prejudges, and thereby conjures conflict, confusion, stress, and all of life’s ‘relationship’ problems. With that realization, we may be graced to see ‘behind’ the mind-made conceptions that shape our problem-making perceptions. In truth, real love is way beyond our personal, cultivated, and curated thoughts and feelings – we may see all that not as ‘bad’ but as a distortion and limitation.
That direct inner seeing is in itself instantly freeing; one opens – in a sense, returns – is restored to one’s original, universal self-nature of pure, non-personal love, including real peace, beauty, and joy. That’s our shared, infinite (undying) Being-nature.
~ The living presence of the love one IS, remains like space and light, unconditioned, when all resistance to what is actually happening now falls away. There’s no doer and nothing to do to make an effort to love, but to let things be as they are, and to relate and respond naturally, lovingly, appropriately. Let that totally open, free and freeing awareness gently lead and feed relationships, and be well, healthy and happy, aka, content. Aware living well and truly is a daily challenge to meet, greet and respond directly to change; to be, to love and to act in fidelity with reality. 🙂
