On Love & Loss - Jan & Feb 2023
Love - deep affection or fondness for person or thing; beloved one; greatly cherish
Loss - losing or being lost; detriment resulting from losing
This isn’t about what love is or isn’t - or what loss is or isn’t - it also isn’t about how we should/could love or be loved - how we should/could experience loss or be lost - . . . it’s simply a reflection on the mystery that is love, the mystery that is loss, and all that we can’t fully know or understand or give advice about
I feel that love has a lot to do with belonging, the latter being a strange concept in itself - how can we belong? how can we not belong? - how can we belong to others until we belong to ourselves?! This is me contemplating belonging after reading Toni Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye’ and moving on to ‘Beloved’; as well as creating a women’s circle series around the root story of ‘The Ugly Duckling’ - root story, because it links us back to our origins, our roots; the story becomes an invitation to enter with-in and search for that space, that sacred space inside ourselves which is found only by trusting both our intuition and our imagination on a very deep level, that space in which we completely belong and feel whole
To me this circles back to belonging and love and loss, and a certain knowing and un-knowing - a weaving and un-weaving - how our own rites of passage and our sense of knowing ourselves has its own cyclical nature as we change, transform and are always in a state of becoming. All this to say that I found within these stories certain resonances, certain streams running at times parallel, at times converging and then diverging; as different as the stories are they are also so similar. How can we be found so wanting? How can we let what others think of us affect us so much? And yet belonging is a process, is a journey, and it is an important one, for sometimes we do not only need to belong to ourselves, we need to belong to a community - this is what the “ugly” duckling does, he goes off to find his own, he might not know exactly where he is headed but he knows what it feels like not to belong and he finds out what it feels like to find one’s own tribe - as soon as he lays eyes on the swans he is transfixed, he knows with his whole body, with his spirit that he must belong to them and this longing for this feeling is what drives him to keep searching - I feel that we all pass through something like this, at least the lucky ones do. To be exiled, to know exile, is to know the drive for what you belong to, to know the difference (which is, in itself, such a gift), to see through the illusions, and to perhaps be free too
So much of our experience is connected, it’s such a web and I haven’t even opened up to the different types of: love, loss, belonging, exile, freedom. . .all connected and affecting each other in ways we can never possibly know for certain, and I guess that’s part of the charm, part of the beauty
There is a beauty to everything we experience and how we experience it is perhaps also key - how we decide to react to something usually affects how we look at it and also how we remember it - the emotions in memory, all those fragments merging together, forming the same picture. . .only slightly different given time. . .this is a form of loss, not much can be retained perfectly, untouched - a scent, an emotion, a vision perhaps yet our subconscious does play with us, it protects us at times -- but this is a thought for another day. These thoughts though are still playing with the idea of cycles, as nature we too circle in and out of things, there is no way out of the Life/Death/Life cycle - because everything is transformed. When we look at nature, nothing ever stops at death, because death is a transformation, that energy of an ending creates something new - from Winter comes Spring, from death comes re-birth, always
This reminds me of the old Inuit story about ‘Skeleton Woman’ which exemplifies the psychic stages of mastering embrace - our intuitive, instinctive nature knows that all is needed, there is a time for love, a time for life, a time for death, a time for transformation, and a time for all of it - there is so much richness to unpack here that this is the story we’re going through in the women’s circle dedicated to ‘On Love & Loss’
And so this wasn’t a ‘how to’ love or be loved, ‘how to’ experience loss or be lost, ‘how to’ belong or ‘how to’ know, it’s about the search, the journey and the longing to find what’s yours; the feeling that once you belong to yourself, you love yourself, and you’re as whole and holy as you can be. . .and then you can share this, you can share yourself with friends, who become family - not necessarily because they’re blood but because they’re your tribe
I leave you with Dante’s notion that the secret rhythm of the universe is the rhythm of love, which moves the stars and the planets - “love is the source, center and destiny of experience”
A Friendship Blessing
May you be blessed with good friends.
May you learn to be a good friend to yourself.
May you be able to journey to that place in your soul where
there is great love, warmth, feeling, and forgiveness.
May this change you.
May it transfigure that which is negative, distant, or cold in you.
May you be brought in to the real passion, kinship, and
affinity of belonging.
May you treasure your friends.
May you be good to them and may you be there for them;
may they bring you all the blessings, challenges, truth,
and light that you need for your journey.
May you never be isolated.
May you always be in the gentle nest of belonging with your
anam ċara.
(Anam Ċara: a book of Celtic wisdom - John O’Donohue)
. . .
Books On Love & Loss. . .i love and return to
Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and the other classic authors speak to the different kinds and forms of love, while authors such as Cicero and Tolkien often focus on friendship - philia can be as powerful as eros. I love Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ because it reminds me of the beauty of transformation, of the fragmentedness of life too
The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
this work embodies love, loss, how they are felt and dealt with by different personalities, given the setting i also find it relates to our boundarylessness as beings living with and in nature, love his style of writing too - the flow is tangible
Conversations on Love - Natasha Lunn
she talks about the different kinds of love, loss in beginnings and endings, relationships with strangers, friends, family and in a really refreshing way, if you’re not looking for another novel this might be the way to go
The Story: Love, Loss & the Lives of Women - ed. Victoria Hislop
a lovely collection of short stories which includes sections on both ‘love’ and ‘loss’!
On Grief and Reason: Essays - Joseph Brodsky
this is a gem, i return to it every now and then, it’s quite potent stuff but the lines stay with me, especially the essays ‘On Grief and Reason’ which relates to Eliot, and ‘The Condition we call Exile, or Acorns Aweigh’ - it’s about the writer in exile, about the aims of literature, misplacement and displacement, exile as a form of success, opportunity, freedom. . .
Poetry
There are so many poets whose verses are steeped in love and friendship, loss and longing and well all poetry is life and emotion so the list is not a list - Rumi and Hafiz are always favourites
The Complete Poems - John Keats
there’s something so special about Keats, i use this often in a divinatory way
The Flowers of Evil - Charles Baudelaire
this is a very different kind of love and loss poetry, it’s very french and very edgy, worth looking into