On Love

Venus is going through my twelfth; and we’ve all just come out of its conjunction to Neptune and Chiron.  It’s still in Pisces, the sign of its exaltation.  The sign of surrender, of dissolving of the self into the infinite void.  I don’t know what Venus in Pisces is really like, but I have been thinking about love and here’s what I wrote while she drifts in my twelfth, while she drifts through the sign of the Fish:

Love cannot be forced, manipulated or extracted. Do any of that and you kill the magic, you break the fragile bubble that is love. It flows freely and picks its own direction. And all you can do is surrender. Maybe it’ll flow over you and then away; or maybe it’ll flow by you; or maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones and it’ll bathe you in its glory forever.

There’s a great need in people for love, for romantic love. But I think we’re approaching this the wrong way when we pin it on someone and we pine. We pine, we suffer, we stumble, we curse, we cry. But why? I don’t see it like that anymore. I see it as an impersonal force that operates through us.  It doesn’t matter who you pin it on or whether you direct it at someone or not. It doesn’t matter whether we’re genetically programmed for it to perpetuate the species or if it’s a mystical surge in God’s heart that finds its way in ours.

If you think of the vastness of space and the endlessness of time, you’ll see you’re just a speck on a blue dot hurtling through time headed for eventual oblivion. You’re surrounded by forces so large that you can barely comprehend them. You aren’t even in control of your own breath; your heart might stop any minute.  But through this vast space, in these large currents that buffet you, you have felt love, yes? You have longed? And I hope, as you did, you gave blessings to the ones you loved and to the force of love itself, which as it flowed through you, divinized you. Took you out of your limited compass of self and swelled your heart so large that all humanity was bathed in your tenderness.

Love is not a terrible thing, longing is. Love is not a terrible thing, manipulation is. Love is not a terrible thing, but trying to force it into shapes it resists is. Terrible because it causes suffering and love should not be suffering. It should be a double blessing: for the one who feels it and the one who receives it. And we can make it like that. We can make love like that.

Bless it when it comes to you and let it go when it wants to leave. No matter what happens, you’ll always know that small speck of the Universe you might be, but something monumental, timeless, seeking, haunting touched you, too.

P.S.  I’m calling this post “On Love” because I’m laughing at myself. Have you read Gibran’s “On Love”?

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