Love is a human creation. One of our best. We created love as part of the Neolithic Revolution. Love was one of the many side effects of agriculture. Before agriculture, our ancestors hunted and gathered in family groups and clans. Interpersonal relationships had nothing to do with what we call love. They were functional, survival oriented. Arranged marriages are a vestigial remnant of mesolithic practices we rightly consider absurd and oppressive. Love could only begin to flourish in permanent settlements where division of labor created leisure, at least for some people. Leisure to pursue things like love, art, self realization. Human pursuits aimed at quality of life, not just survival. The pursuit of happiness. Love is a connection: two people who are drawn to each other opening up so each can really experience what the other is like. To do that we both have to become super vulnerable with each other. That doesn't happen in the midst of a life or death struggle for survival.
Massively misleading. Love, love is a verb / Love is a doing word… A clever lyric, to be sure, and an appealing sentiment. But no, the real thing is not that simple. It's true, love is not a thing or a feeling, but it's also not something I can do on my own. There's no such thing as unrequited love. Love is born and comes into bloom as a connection between two people. A one-sided love affair is a delusion. Being obsessively infatuated with someone who doesn't feel the same way about me is clearly not a sign of connection between us, it's just a fantasy. Emotion, not feeling. Obsessive infatuation is one of many kinds of wrongheadedness: using my potentially godlike mental abilities against myself.
Love is connection. Love is the connection between two people who let down their habitual defenses and open up to each other. Love requires vulnerability. When two people are open and vulnerable with each other they easily affect each other, causing feelings to arise. The feelings aren't love, they're what being vulnerable feels like in that instant. Feelings change constantly but love does not. If we both let difficult feelings wash over us then disappear naturally our connection will get stronger and deeper. If either of us allows feelings to turn into emotions our connection will weaken quickly. Emotions are always negative and destructive. Our connection will stay strong only as long as we both work to keep it strong. We have to resist the temptation to enforce togetherness, a thing our culture strongly promotes via monogamy.
Love of nature. Before we could appreciate how beautiful the natural world is we had to make our way out of it. We had to get some perspective on it. The beauties of nature are lost on someone who's struggling to survive pitiless nature's supreme indifference. So agriculture also gave rise to the love of nature, the appreciation of natural beauty. We may love nature, but nature doesn't love us back. We may well destroy ourselves soon. Nature will do just fine without us.
From love to self realization. Romantic love and the love of nature are gateway drugs for the hard stuff: self realization. If I'm paying attention and not just absently riding love like a roller coaster, the wonderful feelings I experience in romantic love or the love of nature are a clue there might be something more to life than survival, security, esteem. I have to go on a quest to find out. That's how love gives rise to the spiritual quest. Nature was my best friend all through childhood, a pretty way of saying I had no friends. Nature can be an inspiration and a refuge but love of nature is ultimately a dead end when it comes to making progress with love because nature can't love me back. I can't forge a relationship with nature. For that I need human love. I had to get over my atavistic devotion to nature before I could make much progress. I still appreciate nature's beauty but can't afford to spend my time out in the woods. I have work to do, and it doesn't get done out there. That's OK, nature is everywhere. These days my favorite part of nature is the air. Leela's little zephyrs and sylphs caressing my face through an open window all night long.
Service as an act of love. I was introduced to the spiritual notion of service at weekend retreats I went to when I lived in Tallahassee in the 1970s. Part of the program at these retreats was something they called seva or karma yoga: unpaid grunt work touted as selfless service. But the very idea of selflessness is bullshit; it lacks the ring of truth because the self is always there. Love makes work into something greater, not selflessness. Working with love is an act of devotion, an expression of adoration. For us grunts seva just was a series of mandatory work details that we did not love. They made the weekend profitable for the guru and his minions. For us they were a dreary business. The serving I had done much earlier in life, at sleep-away camp in the 1960s, made more sense to me because there was parity: we took turns serving (scut work) and being the boss. It wasn't until I started working at Mataam Fez in Boulder in the 1980s that a deeper kind of service took root in me. I blossomed as a result.
The problem with mandatory monogamy. I've struggled my whole life through trying to find the right way to love. Only now, in my seventies, am I beginning to see the light, and that light is making this decade far and away my favorite so far. For me, the right way to love is consensual non-monogamy. I never got love right before because I was so deeply mired in the cultural norm that requires love to be monogamous, a norm so pervasive it becomes invisible, accepted as the only way. In college I had two non-monogamous moments. One worked for a little while and the other didn't. In Boulder we were all expected to be non-monogamous, and I got into it for a bit, but then I rebelled. I didn't want to be told how to live my love life. Here in Seattle I got married to an extremely jealous woman and I tried to force myself to embrace monogamy once and for all. It was a disaster. A profoundly fruitful disaster, driving me to finally begin surrendering to my own internal authority and waking up a little. A few years later I dove into my first successful non-monogamous relationship, with Ruth. After about nine years Ruth and I thought we were breaking, but instead of breaking up we became good friends. Our dance connection is still very strong and intimate. Thanks to our dancing, and to tango in particular, we still feel deeply connected, we still feel love. In the meantime, my love affair with Ariel has blossomed. All this love in my life has conspired to turn my thinking upside down. I've come to see human culture's near universal insistence on monogamy as a curse, the cause of endless heartache and violence. Having to be monogamous, as the culture so strenuously demands, forces lovers to put way too much pressure on each other. Nobody can be everything to anyone, despite what all the culturally correct love songs say. Lovers start falling out of love because they each expect the other to meet all their needs for intimacy and companionship. It forces lovers to spend way too much to time together, not allowing them the luxury of waiting until they both want to be together. Enforced togetherness puts enormous strain on the relationship, and that strain starts eating away at intimacy. Love needs enormous amounts of space to breathe. We need to have the chance to feel longing for each other, to wait until we're both eager to be together again. Ariel and I have been learning together the fine art of cultivating want.
Falling in love vs living in love. My one true love Leela, disguised as Ariel, asked me to consider the difference between falling in love and living in love: staying that way. If we take away the unfair disadvantage of having to be monogamous, as we have, how do we make love last? It's easy at first, but a relationship doesn't stay new. Novelty addiction is especially sad in love. As our new love took off and we were both swept away in the intoxication of new relationship energy I tried to find what my own limits were. Being home alone had become my core spiritual practice ever since I moved into my new home. I went from being all by myself all day every day, all night every night except for a couple hours' dancing some nights, to being crazy in love with this girl and making room for her in my already very full life. Falling in love turned my life upside down, and I made some sizable blunders. But the world showed us the way. The realities of Ariel's busy life, her work and her other loves, left room for two get-togethers in the week: once mid-week, and once on the weekend, when we could go dancing together, the original basis for our connection and a very important element for us both. The realities of my life, Leela's demands on me and the decidedly twin bed she put me in meant no sleepovers. We have both chafed at these limits, but they've worked wonderfully well as a tool to keep us working on learning the fine art of cultivating want.
Loving my body. My body is the perfect tool for making progress with love because my body is Leela, who is the world, who is everything there is. So my body has all the answers to my questions about making progress. It contains all wisdom. However, I had to stop harming my body before I could use it as a tool for that work. I had to stop damaging it with booze, drugs, and mediocre food. I had to start giving it plenty but not too much of the right kind of exercise. I had to make all the right choices for me and none of the wrong ones. To do that I had to pay close attention to body sensations, letting my body guide me to what it wanted, because my brain is incapable of making good choices. I had little tastes of progress along the way, but I didn't start making significant progress with love until I surrendered to my body's inherent wisdom, aka Leela's guidance, in all those areas.
Loving the world as it is. Making progress with love is an ongoing course in loving the world as it is. When I tried to meditate in all those years before Leela spoke to me, all the ways I was not at peace with the world come crowding in to yell at me, filling my head with noise. Meditation is supposed to be finding neutrality with each of those noisy voices, one at a time. Neutrality was the peace I was longing for. But I found no neutrality, and the voices keep multiplying endlessly. That's what I was up against doing formal meditation. Formal meditation was preparatory work I had to do until I was ready to let Leela take over. Now my meditation is surrendering to Leela, surrendering to the world, loving the world. Whatever part of the world seems unbearable to me right now is also Leela. Putting conscious conditions on the world, like I'll love the world when there's true racial equality, or I can't love a world where corporations control the economy and exploit workers would defeat that. Holding onto or cherishing any kind of fixed ideology, position, opinion, or core value is an automatic noise generator. Ideological noise generators get sets off by the tiniest infraction, turning my life into noisy hell. If I hold to any kind of ideology I defeat myself. I end up unable to love the world because this is the only world there is. It won't change to meet my unrealistic conditions. Since I can't love everything about the world, I focus on what I do love. As I make progress with love I learn to love the world as it is. The world is Leela's creation: a vast cosmic game we're all playing, love it or not.
Love in the time of covid. The pandemic came at just the right time for me. It deprived me of dance, which I have relied on for human contact since I left my marriage in 2008. I broke up with my long term sweetheart right before the pandemic hit, so I got a double dose of being alone. That threw me back onto the physical basics of making progress. Those all became love's way of teaching me. I had just broken free of booze and addiction, so I focused on the other basics: exercise, diet, and meditation. In all three areas, love patiently taught me how to make progress. I got to feeling desperately sad and lonely as that first summer of the pandemic wore on. That's what stirred me to start writing these stories. Writing about my life helped me reconnect with the good training I have had over the years. I was able to recognize my sad and lonely state as the result of emotions, not feelings. Emotions are empty mental creations. I have power over them if I choose to exercise it. I was inflicting sadness and loneliness on myself. I'm the one in charge. Since then I've slowly turned all that around. I don't need a sweetheart to complete me. I'm a complete human in myself. Alone is not the same thing as lonely. Soon after I anchored myself in that realization, new love found me.