First, a note.... This is a most unconventional thing for me to do, as I am
usually a rather private person about my inner thoughts. But yesterday,
3-19-98, a lot of things finally came clear in my head, about myself and a
number of other things, all of which are intertwined. Please leave now if
you don't wish to read these stream of consciousness ramblings. I poured
myself out onto the pages of a sketchbook, and I have no desire to hear about
how WRONG I am or how STUPID I am. As always, other comments would be welcome.
-T
3-18-98:
-Rumi
It is not so much the need for a single person as it is the need for love.
Love drives you to extremes. Love can ruin at the same time as it can help.
It is a volatile substance not to be handled lightly. Yet love is the thing
to which many aspire and few truly find. Partial love comes easily, but it
is not completely correct. Partial love still has its many faults, whether
they be jealousy or disrespect, frustration or impatience. True love is like
true aikido, it only comes when you are ready, and then it may only trickle
and seep into your consciousness slowly, rather than making a grand
entrance with pomp and fanfare. True love cannot replace partial love
quickly without upset. It can slowly grow over partial love like a clinging
vine, until the ugly partial love is again beautiful in life.
If partial love is to be overthrown, it must be because there is something
better to take its place. If there is nothing better then you should work and
make efforts to make something better, or you should free yourself and your
partner from the anguish and falsehood of partial love. Be good friends,
then become lovers, but do not pretend at love if it does not exist, for that
is cruelty beyond measure. Love freely, and with strength, but do not
love halfway to your goal.
If you love a friend, love them truly as a friend.
If you love a lover, love them truly as a lover.
But do not confuse the two.
I realize now that I have been quite guilty of loving F****** incompletely, when I wish to love him completely.
Loving completely means also accepting and being aware of the finality of things. There will always be some end. Loving completely is loving despite the end, and retaining the willingness to gracefully accept the end when it comes.
Love only accepts the best. Know that to be part of love you must excise the weak and deformed parts of yourself. They are not true and cannot be part of complete love. We allow the killing of love, because to die in love, unafraid, is to be reborn into a new and greater life.
When love ends, this life is still retained, for the rite of passage has been completed successfully, you have excised the untrue parts of yourself. There is no need to go back to the bad old days.
O'sensei once said:
This applies to love as well. It is not the things you do so much as the spirit and the frame of mind you do them in---Love is not about the flower giving, candy, and roses. Love is about the meanings which SHOULD and NEED to lie beneath those actions. It requires a oneness on the part of the individual before you may truly join in love with another. If you join with another before you have found love in yourself, negativity in some form is often the result.
Two spirals should join and dance with one another, but as no two dancers may dance if they are leaning on each other, no two spirals can continue their own flows if they try too hard to integrate together. They must be happy within themselves before they may be happy together. Two spirals, once happy, will join to create the most beautiful of arts together, but they cannot unless there is happiness within each of them.
To join the spirals prematurely is wrong.
To allow the spirals to find one another and dance together is right, and
should be the purpose of complete love.
Now, if you'd care to, read the ramblings of my own thoughts on this Over a Year Later