Considering Love...

For many years I have been considering Love. Just how important is Love in my life now and how much of a role has it played in my life up until now?

I write this very much not as a teacher of Love but rather an inexperienced student of Love; learning as I move along the path of life.

Love really became of paramount importance to me through what might be termed a spiritual awakening, although I did not see it that way at the time. I had fallen madly in love – for the first time in my late fifties – with a woman I met on a hike!

After only about six months of an intensely happy relationship, I lied to her concerning a situation which had actually occurred as a result of my then alcoholic behaviour. She chose to end our relationship and I was absolutely devastated. For a long, long time quite inconsolable, yet always hoping ...

In the past this rejection would have been the perfect trigger for me to drown my deeply felt sorrow in the always temporary bottomless pit of alcohol-solace. But not this time. This time was somehow different. I did not resort to this temporary escape, not through my own will-power but some other … power. It was as if this power was willing me, willing me with no required volition of my own. Amazing if not quite miraculous.

I subsequently believed, and still do – hence my writing about 'Considering Love' – that I was being led, guided to pursue a more 'mystic' understanding of Love rather than a human frailty-based romantic Love. This is my chosen path still.

As I have continued my 'mystic' Love quest I am reminded regularly of the consistency of the major religious and philosophical teachings of the primacy of Love as the healing agent par excellence. Yet we human beings seem lethargic in the extreme to take this upon ourselves as the 'teaching supreme'.

I certainly understand and personally naturally experience the very real, very great difficulty, sometimes even an acknowledged impossibility, to put this advocated Love into practice. However I do believe it is absolutely necessary to attempt, in whatever ways I am able, to express this Love in the living of my life.

The concept of Love can be defined or attempted to be described in countless ways. I believe that Love may be able to be expressed in my life by attempting to discover what, for me at least, it might embrace.  

It is with this in mind that I intend to cover, during the next few weeks, numerous aspects or attributes that I believe can be embraced under the umbrella of Love. I look forward to sharing these with you in 'Considering Love ...'