Composed on Valentine’s Day

and related to love. These days, I can’t get these Laura Marling lyrics out of my head. It’s disconcerting because they are deeply involved with things that I would like to think of myself as being deeply involved in—if not presently.
I have an unhealthy relationship with love. To say that I love to love love, would be only to understand what Joyce meant. We are all pieces of love. Love is a part of the universal structure. Nature is love. It’s hard, sometimes brutal. Sometimes, when unrequited or scorned, it can be downright vicious. But it can be gentle and humble and sweet and lying dormant for ages. It’s not our awareness that makes us special creatures in the universe, it’s our awareness of our awareness (damned tautology) and the resultant reflection, allowing for reason that make of us unique manifestations of universal energy.
I don’t know if anybody has ever really considered it before, but perhaps humanity, with its layered awareness is actually a punishment.
The great order of the universe is composed of who-knows-what kind of logic. Perhaps it is those creatures that will beat themselves to death—physically or mentally—attempting to understand this awareness they have of the world around them that are the scorned creatures of the universe. Most animals content themselves to the understanding that they need to find food and shelter, procreate, and try to stay alive. Humans are different. We want more.
Perhaps that’s part of where love comes into play. It is a higher level of existence to understand the great cosmic order wherein part of staying alive is creating for one’s mate and progeny the ability to continue existence. It is the satisfaction of one of the highest callings of nature: survive.
In some ways, surviving is the easier of nature’s dual calling. Reproduction, especially for humanity—and this is where it can become quite a trying task to be a human—can take place in two different realms.
While at first glance it doesn’t seem as though these two worlds, as opposed to a unified one, would cause all that much harm: you simply have to pick. Ah, but the problem is, of course that these two worlds (the physical and the intellectual/mental) interact with each other, are inseparable from each other, and even exist in the exact same place at the exact same time. As is probably pretty evident, that one remove brings with it both the possibility of cataclysmic disaster and inconceivable joy—where the former is something like a cutting off of one’s self from their awareness and the latter is something like coming to a kind of harmony and balance within the universal spectrum.
Words, words. Nothing but sweet words that turn into bitter orange wax in my ears.
But love and the mind are not strangers to each other, and they are both on pretty decent terms with the body, so why shouldn’t love be the web that weaves them together and makes of itself such a delightful nuisance?
The love of the mind, the love of the body, and the love of the soul are all very different breeds of the same species. There are some people whose genetic makeup just clicks with your genetic makeup, and when your two parts come together there is a whole lot of joy, thoroughgoing joy. There are people who stimulate your mind in such a way that, though they might not be what you are normally physically attracted to, the fact that they stay in your mind—haunting it as it were—for so long and popping into it at such strange times that you can’t help but gravitate toward them. There are people you are drawn to, or who happen to cross your path, whose soul (unique manifestation of the universe) reaches out and connects to another soul such that there can never be a severing: it is as if they could actually communicate with each other through the universal schema of symbolization and communication which renders space and time impotent.
Sometimes vaulting into the heavens leaves one with as tendency toward flights of rhetorical fancy, but never fear because the fall always leaves one bruised and slightly more cautious the next time… slightly.
There are merits to all of them. It is very nice to have somebody there to take care of those bodily needs that seem to creep up as a matter of course for the human body—both men and women get the craving. It is also very nice to have somebody there to talk to, to listen to, to learn from, to teach, and to deal with the things of the mind. It is also very nice to have that soul mate.
Perhaps that’s why it is so difficult to find what people refer to as “the one.” To find a soul mate is incredibly difficult. The soul has so many strands, threads, strings, colors, styles, and whathaveyou that the chances of bumping into one that fits your particular network of soul whatever is pretty chancy I’d say—by which I’d mean nearly impossible. A mind-mate is somewhat more probable, as the mind is based on the structure of the universe—finding a mind that is structured similarly to yours can be somewhat trying, but determination and effort will find you attaining your prize. The body, with its physicality makes just about any tool capable of pleasure. The flexibility, shape, and size of each particular unit is taken into the alternate aspects of their partner(s), and it makes pleasure possible from just about anybody.
It’s hard to say whether or not the pyramid of pleasure is oriented properly with the soul at the top and pointing towards to the heavens with the base of the body holding us steadily to the earth—primacy being sometimes relative—or if it’s not something inverted with the point of the soul creating a fulcrum whereby the body and mind must remain in balance or the whole structure begins to lean and tilt with the potential for falling over completely. Either way, what we see when we look at the thing with the proper set of eyes is that they are all connected, all important, and all necessary of thorough investigation.
My loves are spread all over the world. I have not known physical love in a couple of months. A mind with which to commune would be pleasant in the extreme, but unfortunately the style of my mind makes me too pensive and standoffish to seek these minds out. The nature of my soul makes me a wanderer, a finder, and a perpetual bad bet for the long run. Of course it’s because I’m scared. Did you think I didn’t know that? Fear runs rampant in the parts of my mind that desire my own breed of greatness. The nature of the fear is something that might bear discussion, but it is definitely there.
At any rate, in my present solitude—which is not entirely un-welcome—I reach out to the ones that I have loved, the ones I will love, and those for whom my love transcends time and space. I feel extraordinarily lucky to have been loved by those who have loved me—from family to lovers—and perhaps luckier to have loved those same people. I regret none of my relationships. My inadequacies and deficiencies as a human being have made me, unfortunately, a villain of the highest caliber, and I carry it with me every day. No regrets, no surrender. I love those people perhaps more powerfully now I see the effect they have made on my life. Share love today.