This week the #Ecotrain Question of the Week (QOTW) was created by yours truly!
Zinnia on the homestead
Love Lessons
For the last @Tribesteemup Biweekly Question, What does it mean to be human?, I dug in a little bit about our experiences in Earth School, the fact that we're all here experiencing life in these bodies and within the context of relationships through space and time. Love is one of the most powerful of teachers, and through this, we are given opportunities to grow, to change & to be changed, seemingly by forces from without and of course within.
We commonly employ phrases like fall in love, head over heels in love, being taken with x, and other things that let us know that love is a deeply involved process that even can make us crazy sometimes. It's important to also add here that love as a long term thing can be a choice! We can choose to cultivate ardor or connection with someone(thing) through spending time with it or focusing on the positive attributes about it. But yet, the romantic or magnetic aspect that we refer to as love is often a "hit ya up side the head" kind of thing, at least in the beginning.
So if it leaves, are we still thankful we experienced it?
Zinnias <3
Here are a few reasons that I'm thankful for the process of loving, even if it is ultimately lost.
Love Teaches Us
Love is one of the most powerful of teachers. Much is written about love, but the experience of it moving through us has perhaps the greatest capacity to transform us in ways that other factors of our lives simply cannot.
Love is the great mover.
It moves mountains, sends people on quests with indescribable longings, across the world for the object of love or to the same part of town night after night... Love sets us in motion and when we are without it, we're always searching and moving on the lookout to connect with it.
As Rumi says in Desire and the Importance of Failing:
A thirsty man calls out, ‘Delicious water,
where are you?’ while the water moans,
‘Where is the water drinker?’
The thirst in our souls is the attraction
put out by the Water itself.
We belong to It,
and It to us.
God’s wisdom made us lovers of one another.
In fact, all the particles of the world
are in love and looking for lovers.
Queen Anne's Lace & Spider's Web
We Cannot Possess What We Love
This is a great lesson of love. Because love feels so amazing and is such a heightened experience, we initially want to grasp it, to box it in, to hold onto it, not realizing that it is a force moving through us. Love is a different animal than the word marriage or "long term relationship". While love can exist within these structures, they're not one and the same. The question, is it better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, comes forth from this desire to hold onto love and from the acknowledgement of pain from loving and losing. We want love to stick around and we want love to stay. We desire that consistency from love, but is that the nature of love?
And what about reciprocity? What if you love something that doesn't love you back?
I learned a great thing in a scene at the end of the movie Adaptation with Nicolas Cage:
Charlie Kaufman: There was this time in high school. I was watching you out the library window. You were talking to Sarah Marsh.
Donald Kaufman: Oh, God. I was so in love with her.
Charlie Kaufman: I know. And you were flirting with her. And she was being really sweet to you.
Donald Kaufman: I remember that.
Charlie Kaufman: Then, when you walked away, she started making fun of you with Kim Canetti. And it was like they were laughing at me. You didn't know at all. You seemed so happy.
Donald Kaufman: I knew. I heard them.
Charlie Kaufman: How come you looked so happy?
Donald Kaufman: I loved Sarah, Charles. It was mine, that love. I owned it. Even Sarah didn't have the right to take it away. I can love whoever I want.
Charlie Kaufman: But she thought you were pathetic.
Donald Kaufman: That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That's what I decided a long time ago.
That was her business, not mine. You are what you love, not what loves you. That's what I decided a long time ago.
Having experienced unreciprocated love myself, this taught me something. That even if the person never acknowledges or reciprocates your love, that your loving them is an experience that you're having. Own that. If love becomes recognizable or your lover leaves, realize that the love worked on you, taught you, transformed you in some way. Be grateful for the feeling of it moving through you, don't grasp it or expect something from it. Love is sufficient unto itself.
In the end, love points us toward love
When we experience loss in the outer realm it reminds us that we contain the source of love within ourselves as well.
Pain comes from the feeling of separation or loss from something that can be taken from us. As we discussed above, we cannot control the object of our love, to do so would kill love itself and it would turn more into a gross twisted form of dependency. If love moves on or the person does not reciprocate our love, we remember that:
“Listen, O drop, give yourself up without regret,
and in exchange gain the Ocean.
Listen, O drop, bestow upon yourself this honor,
and in the arms of the Sea be secure.
Who indeed should be so fortunate?
An Ocean wooing a drop!
In God's name, in God's name, sell and buy at once!
Give a drop, and take this Sea full of pearls.”
You are not a drop within an ocean,
you are an entire ocean within a drop. -Rumi
Love is within and while it is so fun to play in the outer realm of romance and love connections with others, we remember that we cannot control it, that we are likely richer and full of more character for loving others fully, that we likely learned something of value and that, in the end, we have the source of love within ourselves too. We aren't dependent on our outer environment.
In the end, I wholeheartedly think it is better to have loved and lost than to never love at all.
I am better for my experiences of love, even the heartbreaks.
What do you think? Feel free to answer this QOTW in the comments or write a post of your own and use #ecotrain as your first tag!!
