In the Field of Love

J. Ruth Gendler, USA

Artist, writer and teacher, she has been interested in the intersection of art and writing, language and vision, since a child and is the author of 'The Book of Qualities'.

(Submitted by the author)

When we are most alive, we are beautiful. When we are in love, we are reminded that we are beautiful. And sometimes when we know we are beautiful, we find ourselves in love.

‘In love’ usually means the romantic sense of being with another person who in that moment we feel reflects us perfectly. In love, living in the field of love.

Sometimes I have felt like I was in love, even when there was no one I was in love with. I couldn’t talk about my lover’s hands or eyes or voice. I couldn’t focus all this love on one other, and it was both confusing and revealing to realize how much we become places for each other to rest in.

Alone and ‘in love’, it’s easy to feel like you’re making it up. Our songs and our movies have told us such great sentimental stories about being ‘in love’, that we forget that being in love can be a state of truth as well as an illusion.

Longtime friends witnessing a friend ‘falling in love’ often caution the infatuated person that being in love is a dizzy, temporary state. I prefer to think of this territory not just as a delicious romantic dance, but as a field to which we can travel from many places. There is a way in which being in love with anything – a person, a place, a project – is crossing a border into a country where the ego does not rule, into a state of being where essence is honored.

We are both inside and outside our everyday selves.

I never want to underestimate the capacity that being ‘in love’ has to change our seeing, to expand our vision, and to remind us of both human beauty and human frailty.

The search for the beloved is full of paradoxes. We want to be who we are when we are our best self, and sometimes because we have met that self when we are in love, we believe that self only exists in the presence of the other. So we hold on to the other and lose ourselves, forgetting that love is partly of this world and partly of some other place.

An old beau once spoke to me of the danger of trying to make our lovers be God, insisting that we each need our own relationship to the Source. It sounded logical, but I rebelled at his analysis. In this world, one of the ways we glimpse God is when we are in love. Not that the beloved is God, but that God is the Beloved, a tradition as old as the Song of Songs and the ecstatic poems of wandering Indian mystics, the Sufis.

One of the most beautiful and accessible ways to address God is as Love.

The Greeks gave us an image of Eros, the unpredictable archer before whom even the Gods trembled. Hindus tell their stories of the Gopi maidens seeking Krishna, the bewitchingly beautiful, blue-skinned god; Krishna with his soft glowing eyes and perfumed hair, Krishna drawing women to him, touching in each forgotten registers of being.

What is done with love, is done in beauty to celebrate the God who loves.

More and more I believe in the messengers of love, the envoys and the couriers of beauty who are everywhere.

And I wonder how something so clear can also be so mysterious.

Image credit: "Breaking the Light": http://harveylloyd.com/china.html

Comments

0 comments

Submitted by Gi on Tue, 08/10/2010 - 17:12.

The only thing in life NOT futile - is love.

Submitted by Stuart Anthony on Tue, 08/10/2010 - 10:22.

Jesus had it right.
Love your neighbour as yourself. This is the Law of Life for us humans.
He then took it further and said if you love only those who Love you then what kind of Love is that? He said we should Love our enemies too and do good to those that persecute us.
Now we find how inadequate we can feel in the face of such Golden Rules, yet it is the direction we must face and always try to travel in.
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

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