Braver Love
Last week on the podcast it was poetry time again: this time some Medium Matured Pomes, often performed in the last decade or more but never published until I put them on the Substack last year (in the Thickly Mulched Words section). By the way, I’ve now been releasing these little meanderings into the ether for just over a year, so happy birthday to Ravings from the Lucid Fringe! If you want to dive a little deeper into the back catalogue, follow that link to the website. I have been promising a printed version of the articles for a while, and am currently in my busiest work period of the year, so it ain’t happening yet… but spring is just around the corner!
Meanwhile, as the winter rain in the Cape continues to fall.. another moment to explore the archetypes, exploring that act of Loving a little more.
The rain is pelting down tonight, hurling itself out of the sky, cascading off the roofs, while the wind swirls. Here, though, we are cosy by the fire, like the cat at the edge of the sofa, and invariably thoughts turn to love. The joyful glue, held together by sorrow: a place near the heart/h. So as the clouds cry, I recall places I have loved, parts of myself I have learned to love. ‘Lover’ as a masculine archetype seems, to the popular mind, trivial: youthful nonsense, like the changeable affections of the youths in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night. Some maps of archetypes place him naively at the starting point, emerging from the Fool. And yes, of course, there must be some of that. To sacrifice what you thought you were, for something that might be bigger, and might fail utterly. You can only really tell if it was worth it when you start to listen.
Listening. A key sense; a concave action, like the ear itself. With the eye we can choose what to focus on, but when we listen with our eyes, we need a softer gaze, a gentler kind of sensual response to what is in our field. When we listen in our touch, too, we really feel and intuit what the other wants, how the other responds, for what she yearns. To do this deeply needs a heart that’s broken a few times, humbled by getting it wrong, by the inevitability of changing moods. So in truth, the double-edged Lover takes silly, playful risks from a standpoint of maturity, of seeing leaves fall long before new buds arrive, and trusting the journey. To know grief and choose to Love anyway is a courageous mode of being.
In other words, the Lover is much more than infatuated, even if he can watch himself falling there too. We can write about love forever like a million poets have done, but until my toes are intertwined with yours, we’re just playing with ideas, not hearts. (That applies whether you are a woman, or a forest vine, or a slinky stream, or a crocheted blanket). And the heart is such a junction, a yoking point. Of course the central energy chakra must be a place of Love: it is exactly where we connect from, where we bridge to and from. Perhaps Lovers exist on the same axis as the Fool and the Magician – indeed the Lover must know a thing or two about magic in order to tempt others into tumbling; must know, perhaps, how to bake the perfect pizza pie. Amore. Because the softest sense, able to search and touch and veritably imbibe, is of course the tasty one where the tongue dwells.
It rolls, it engages, it slithers, it turns us on as it is turned on. And that’s just the gourmet buffet. It speaks French, this tongue-langue-language of love, where hard consonants are soon massaged into sibilants, like the butter balls the child Krishna stole. Lovers are, of course, familiar with the thick and creamy side of life. We are at our most loving, perhaps, when stripped of our backbones, remembering our wormy origins, sensuously loving the soil. Though at the same time, love is aware of movement, of the oscillating wave: into form and firmness so that more softening can occur. Inextricably linked to the moon, aware of the cycles, aware of the returning rhythms and rhymes of love lyrics.
The Tarot deck brings us Lovers plural. To my mind-heart-body, You are the Beloved: Lovers seek to dive into the mystery that lies in anything beyond Oneself. And so the ancient Taoists would have us Soul Gaze, softening with that yin left eye, where I perceive Your multiple lives and forms flickering in the shadows, sense the other realms where You also dwell. In such moments I have been drawn in to the unknowable secret at Your heart. In the end, Shakespeare’s comic Lovers recognise their first best choice; but we spiral on, seeking like the epicure if we cannot reign in our wandering energies, like most of our mammal cousins, even if we aspire to the monogamy of many birds, to being variations on our own theme enough to continue the dance with the Beloved.
The Lover is more than this naked gazing, though. Many a Tantric twosome has stumbled on the realities of Love in families, of duty/dharma, of Oriah Mountain Dreamer’s famous call to do what has to be done for the children in the darkest nights – children, those ushers of Love and sometimes of despair. Mine forced my personal circle wider, until now, as young adults, extraordinary in their dazzling differences and similarities, I am forced to learn a little more of that loving essence seen in the act of involuntary but essential letting go.
In another sense this gaze into the Other is the act of building community, in miniature. We need agreements to be able to forge these, to bridge, and as communities expand they need real listening to thrive. Sure, there have been groups, tribes, nations, forever built around the fervour of ideas and banners. They have more to them of what I’d call the Warrior energy (that tricky role so open to his shadow side in today’s world, who no doubt is hammering at the door to my pen and seeking his article too). Love, communal Love just as much as love for the Other or the Self, needs commitment, in the first place to listening, to hearing the hard experiences of others which might knock our flags off course. As many have said, a commitment to free speech includes, most fundamentally, commitment to the speech of those with whom we disagree. But then that’s still a ‘legal framework’, difficult to forge with true spirit not just letter. Look to the tolerance of a mama bear to her silly, snarly, beautiful cubs, cursing and clubbing each other like social media commentators, and you might get a little closer to the truth of allowing free expression as a form of love. I recall telling an African faery tale about the Law of Love, where other laws were thrown out, because Love was supreme; felt, intuited, explored using another channel beyond the rational.
I think, feel, know this is what we most aspire towards. In our time we are attempting, many of us, to grow that circle of community wider than ever. I have felt my heart leap, moving in synchrony with beloved friends a thousand miles away, visible through a screen, but felt through an instantaneous energy connection that can’t be located in 3-D geography. No doubt our ancestors felt this visceral Love too, with distant members of their tribe; though within that pulse of Love there is also the wave of separation, necessary to truly perceive the magnificence of each beloved being - mountain or stream or writer’s mind or lover – before diving back in to merge again. And the merging is itself delicious, at least when breathed into from a distance – sometimes it is excruciating up close, so vulnerable and personal, but the Lover is aware of its inherent beauty, and of the necessity of dissolving barriers to allow it.
There is Love, of course, in music. The fingers caress the piano keys, the guitar strings; they strike the taut skin of the drum; we kiss the reed or the mouthpiece; our vocal chords ring out, echoing the vulva’s structure, finding harmony and resonance. Tantra talks of opening our inner flute, so that we can become a melody played by the Beloved. So yes, there is deep Love in a jam session when there is deep listening, finding together what we can bring into dynamic vibration together. Love is sweet, classical, edgy, grungy, funky, soulful, and of course it is the blues. When one ego steps out, there is sweet recognition for a while; carry on strutting individually for too long, though, and the tune gets bored, the groove dies down. Jam sessions are wonderful places to learn the Law of Love for real. And such improvised spaces work best when there is that Love that is wedded to mutual consent: Betty Martin’s wheel is a good tool for so many life situations: I can only give if you’re willing to receive. I can only take if you’re willing to allow; otherwise there’s disconnect, the Love glue breaks down. This is the tide beneath the verbal, which operates in many an interactive flow state. For many of us the monogamous love relationship is the source of our greatest moments of connection, and our greatest challenges in growth of empathy and understanding; but I’m aware of another sense in which such relationships are crucibles for the bigger task of our connecting our species to the world; perhaps particularly us males of the species. I don’t want to get overly apologetic: there have been plenty of examples of ruthlessly disconnected females in history, encouraging and cheering on their menfolk in going to war against each other, against vulnerable peoples, against forests and oceans. However, the necessity of sociability has often humbled women out of the modern individualistic folly. And as a man, I recognise the need to develop the emotional muscles of Love, given men’s centuries-long push for distancing, for separation, for being One Man Alone Against the World. It was a good game. Now it’s time to grow up. ‘Adulting’ is about learning the truth of Love.
These muscles are stretched, to return to the beginning of this particular meander (as Love always does, in a new way), by losing. Lose and Love: two words that have a strange, similar spelling in English. Mature love is partly about the willingness not just to play, but to play and lose. As many a counsellor would ask, would you rather be right or be loved? To allow someone else to win, to be right: this can be Loving indulgence. To let go. ‘If you love somebody set them free,’ Sting insisted to my teenage self.
The bigger Love, then, is in this act of releasing; and rarely can we let down our vigilance and guard enough for that. Society measures our material worth, yet today’s joys included giving away food from my kitchen to those trying their luck at my gate. South Africa, most unequal of societies: where we cannot help our neighbours, violence flowers. Anti-Love, the force of disconnection, of rupture, unstoppable by security guards with machine guns or razor wire on urban fences. The Lover knows this, as did our forgotten religious heroes, be they Gautama Buddha or Jesus of Nazareth. It is the next phase of our evolution; that is the meaning of ‘the meek shall inherit the earth’. It takes a lot to be meek when you’re being told that Real Men Win At All Costs, and other such garbage.
Yet what the Lover most needs to rise to the surface in us is right here. Breath, breathing in oxygen, breathed out from those forests being threatened by The Winners. Pause. Reflection, and a slow sweetening on the other side of the bitter fall. When my inner Lover sees, I see in differentiated colours, textures; I observe deeply what the tree or the mountain is trying to tell me. There are bigger patterns in the land, which our ancestors met in their listening footsteps. In and out. There it is, the oscillating wave of Love, right there in our nostrils in case we ever forget.
So much of violence on the TV news and the TikTok feed. What if instead we all witnessed ourselves really striving, baking, making love to the world? I suppose there is some of this on our stages at their most radical. The old South Africa’s Immorality Act, forbidding racial mixing in lovemaking, was shown up most intensely in Fugard’s workshopped play on the issue. Once things get to the screen there’s a coyness at work: the distancing visual con, no longer present to the smell of sweat and the actors’ breath, unless (as I’ve shared above) there are other energies present, echoing other moments in the world of touch. By which I don’t mean just physical touch, vital though that is; we are ‘touched’ in our energy bodies, stretching out beyond the tautness of muscles into the electromagnetic spheres of hearts and the imaginal spheres of elemental beings surrounding us, longing for our connections just as our gut bacteria long for our merging with the things we love to dissolution as food.
Music is echoed in a myriad other forms of loving artistic expression, human attempts to capture and honour beauty, to find aesthetics, where that striving for the pulse is uppermost. If Gaia, Mother Earth, goddess, Spirit of the Forest, is She, it may be because she is not me, and yet I am of her, from her, and I long to dance with her. Making Love takes at least two entities; more, for the enlightened souls of the truly loving future communities and nations, perhaps, or for the present-day family saying a grace of thanks before dinner, or the hiker who stands and acknowledges a holy communion between himself, the boulder, the restio reeds, the sunbird, the south-easter. Concordance: harmonious concert; let us sing, love, and find each other. Let Me find You. The Lover leads us towards We. In all our ecstasy and agony. Perhaps our old selves saw the Warrior as the epitomy of bravery. The Warrior has his place, which needs reclaiming still from the multitude of crass stereotypes of masculinity. To do that, his place needs to be clearly in relationship with the Lover. Our emerging and future selves need to see that the deep, braver Lover is an essential ally on our journey, and the rewards he brings his community will be fat and full.