Partrick Ridge, Mount Veeder Appellation, Napa Valley, California,
USA
November 4, 2021
"You don't have to go looking for love when it is where you come
from."
...
"Lots of people have talked about taking that step into the unknown.
Taking that step into the unknown is actually a lot less courageous
than taking a step from the unknown."
...
"If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there."
... George Harrison
"If you don't know where you come from, no road will take you there."
... Laurence Platt
This essay,
It Is Where You Come From,
is the nineteenth in a group of twenty one on
Love:
I've not scheduled time to rewrite "The Book of Love". It's been
rewritten too many times already - the hows, the whys, the wherefores,
all the
romantic
conjectures. Given that we bring no
rigor
to the way we hold love, the subject matter's become alternatively
vague or overly complicated. It's become both illusive and ellusive.
And it's complex. While this may spin-off interesting talking points,
the state of the art of the subject of love is such that
very little of it has made any lasting difference.
For the most part, we're stuck in the illusion that being loved by
another / loving another, is the access to fulfillment / completion (as
in "You fulfill me ...", "You complete me
..."). In essence, we've ceded the possibility of fulfillment /
completion, to what we give to / get from another. And the jury's still
out on what (if anything) is possible for fulfillment / completion and
love when there's no another.
Look: there's nothing wrong with giving love to / getting love from
another. Really there isn't. That should never be in question. Human
beings thrive on giving love to / getting love from
another. What is in question is whether without giving it
to / getting it from another, we have any
direct access
to fulfillment / completion, and hence
direct access
to love. Posed another way, it's "Does who we are have any
direct access
to love other than via giving it to / getting it from
another?", a question which for the most part, our untransformed
culture still answers mostly in the negative, and (to a lesser extent)
dubiously.
There are two areas to which I'm drawn whenever I inquire into what
real love might be, what it is to love, and how to get my beliefs and
preconceptions about love far enough out of my own way so that real
love has a chance of
presencing itself.
The first of these two areas opens up when I ask a question which
occurs in two forms, the first of which is most poignant. It's "How
can I love another when I don't know who I am?". The second form is
a corollary of the first. It's "Who (or even what) is the
'I' I am when I'm loving another, when I don't know who I am?". That's
actually quite galling. It showcases less-than-zero odds
of real love
presencing itself
when we don't know who we are - which hints at that without
transformation, it's likely there's an almost less-than-zero chance of
real love
presencing itself
...
... which teases out the second area, one that rivets my
attention
even more, one that also comes in answer to a question, and that
question is "What (if anything) is possible for love when I don't know
who I am?" which is a mere click past "What (if anything) is possible
for fulfillment / completion when I don't know who I am?".
The prognosis doesn't look good. My answers are (in order) "I can't -
at least not really", "I don't know" (which doesn't bode well
for love), and "Not much" (at best, so-called love is then merely a
palliative for no love), none of which are great options.
We've gotten to the bottom line. All the above could be deemed to be
bad news. Here's good news:
"You don't have to go looking
for love when it is where you come from.".
When
Werner
says that, he isn't saying it like he's making up some new bon
mot for a fortune cookie. He's sharing what he's seeing,
looking at what's already in the space we live in: love as
a "where you come from". "The Book of Love" on the other hand, only has
strategies for where to find love as a "where you go to".
Fully grasping this, calls for a certain maturity, an un-learning of
where we've always believed we'll find love, and a newly transformed
willingness to let that go.