To Repeat Myself
The election results are in! The French people with the good sense of self preservation have stepped away from the brink, choosing to move ahead rather than back. The work of nurturing a great family, or a great society is a multi-generational project. There is much to overcome, debris of past mistakes which must be cleared away. Healing takes time. Learning is a time bound process; trial and error, disappointment is unavoidable. Yet a man/woman, a family, or a nation cannot reverse-wind the clock, that is, out of nostalgia attempt to recreate a past that memory fabricated as ideal–if one is to survive.
……hoping only that love with all of its confusions and potential destructiveness can repair madness, weakness, aloneness.
–George Crane, House of the False Lama
There seems no end to what has been said and will be said about love. Allow me to suggest that love in all of its manifestations, whether for another human being, or for a beautiful flower, is nothing less than a disposition of the self. Love is the opening of the self to another, or in the case of an object, to the other. Love is the essence of learning, a willingness to be changed by a relationship; engaging with sympathy and openness. All relationships entail unknowns, the unpredictable, a wildness. Love is a gamble, one that may humanize and enrich one’s being, or one’s nation.
I offer for your contemplation a tune by Heart, What About Love. Ann Wilson’s vocals soar, and so may we — with the work of love.
