By Alan Abelman imagine@mcn.net
Date: 28 October 2000
Songs Of The Heart
It seems we all have these tides inside of us. The rise and fall of our lives desires washing us to some distant shore. Our destinations unknown as it were. We pull from our hearts our innermost desires to follow, seeking to find what once burned inside of us. What seemed so clear to us when kept in our hearts and souls becomes a vanishing point at the end of a long and winding road, blinded by the setting sun in our eyes once it is revealed and laid before us to follow.
Along the way we leave a trail littered with the wreckage of life. Those we meet as we set out to fulfill our life's simple desires. Always distracted by others lost on their own trails, crossing our paths misleading and confusing us on our journey through life. To hold ones own beliefs that started in our hearts, true, simple, unmolested, pure and unchanged along the way takes more resolve than most thinking beings possess. For just as the ocean rejuvenates the beaches with each passing wave, others in the world wash upon us and recede leaving their own mark upon our souls and hearts.
"It is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all," but imagine perhaps, It is a better love that is never lost than to have loved all. Love can be shown to all, but not all have the ability to truly understand or accept our own images of love. Let alone return to another that love we seek. If the definition of love could be looked up in a dictionary defined, studied and mastered so everybody's version was the same would it still burn in our hearts, souls and minds the way it does. Does the amount of pleasure felt define love? Or does it just enhance the fires within. Than I ponder how can two so set against each other after experiencing what one perceived as true love and upon losing it still feel drawn to want love again? Knowing full well the pain that may once again be associated with love. Will loving and losing love often, harden one to the point of only allowing it to enter our hearts deep enough so that emotions may not take over the mind and pain will not be felt?
Now I ask if in limiting pain are we limiting the love we are allowing ourselves to feel. Pain is not love you say. Pain is hate, regret, & remorse. But what about if the one you truly love suffers a long painful death before your eyes? Then, I believe it is better to have loved and lost. For true love like that is never lost but is carried with us and defines whom we are. I think that to fully feel love pain cannot be ignored. Without knowing pain one cannot understand its opposite, love. For even in a storybook romance, death must come to us all. Now if death came upon two madly in love who had never loved another first, at the exact same time than in that story maybe no pain was felt proving true love knows no pain. I want to be the main character in that book Lance and Sharon Romance, until death we did depart together. Fuck get real.
True love should know no bounds. One would employ all their abilities to make the other happy. Knowing that in doing so their happiness will be discovered. Share them with anyone because true love cannot be caged; and still there is no fear it will return. Possession has no place in real love. For true love is a gift from the heart and soul of someone who wants to share their desires, their fears, insecurities, passions and more with you. And will listen and embrace yours, because two of the same mind is much stronger than one of a separate mind. Once shared and reciprocated true love will return always because the freedom to be oneself is openly felt and never questioned. Never used against the other for personal gain. Only a mutual growth derived from a deep commitment to enhance the others well being. Yet not expecting yours to be enhanced but knowing that by what you send out is in fact enhancing your life. To love and honor, maybe we should honor each other's desires in love instead. To have and to hold, how about to experience and set free your and the others heart, soul and mind? In sickness and health, or perhaps anytime you need me I'll know and be there by your side to help. Until death do we part, or more like, then our souls shall never part.
I hope what I have written is not some latent drug induced psychosis that has come back to haunt me like some bad acid trip from the 70's. Life is ever changing, evolving mutating into something that we all are trying to mold to fit our own views instead of flowing with others around us. I believe that just as in after every cloudy rainy stormy sky, the people who watch, study and report those happenings will tell us that this too will completely change, and after all the dark clouds are gone the sun will shine and it will be warm and beautiful again. So to shall be our ability to change and love again. But first all pain must be removed from our hearts, as are the dark clouds from the sky, before our hearts will be open to truly be filled with love again.
I don't believe love can be rigidly defined. There are so many levels and differing amounts of commitment that people are willing to share with one another. If one opens their mind, soul and heart fully, to all we are drawn to. Many let downs will occur before someone comes into our lives that seem to be following a path that parallels ours. If they are fortunate and the stars align between them, and the waves of time have equally washed over their minds and souls enough to erode them onto the same beach, at the same moment in time. Perhaps they will reach out and hold each other's hands as long as their paths don't stray too far from one another's. One should never fill their hearts with sadness or sorrow if their paths do separate, leading them once again in different directions. For the lessons we learn from each other should always be used to increase our capacity to really know what it is to truly love and be loved not on some materialistic level. But on the plane that will allow us to harmonize the auras that surrounds us all with the wind and the sun and the rain. Darkness will always precede light and the warmth we seek will be followed by the coldness we must all endure at some point in our being.
And if in the end when one looks down with their back to the sun instead of in their eyes and sees the shadow of another's soul or being next to theirs you will know your time here has been truly blessed.
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