This delightfully and strikingly crafted line from the inside jacket of Amy Bloom's Love Invents Us touches me with the truth of a soul's mirror:
"Love takes <all> in this rich novel into unimagined places and unknown parts of themselves. It doesn't heal them or save them or hand them a happy ending, but it takes them to harbor, and points the way home."
That sums my own experiences in the land of "experiential awareness" over these last few years. Having attained what I felt to be a rather laudable standing of spirituality and general awareness, I threw myself into marriage with a most unusual man and his clan of family and extended members. The oddball surprises and chaos within the framework of this group were, to me, just "homework" assignments as I worked to put my beliefs into practice.
Within the emotional tsunami that slammed my growth potential, I chose a form of personalized amnesia. I have found myself at this bus stop in time: whether he was a psychopath is totally irrelevant to my "now." I can remember the stresses of "choice" and knowing that this little motion picture was not as I had envisioned my continuing directorial examples to play. I thought I comprehended the communication theorem and the ability to "live in the moment." However, I not only lost touch with that fallible "me" but also let go my dreams and goals for the time following the "I do's."
My youngest daughter and her fiance gave me a media streaming apparatus that I have been thoroughly enjoying. I watched "Vanilla Sky" yesterday and found myself mesmerized. Oh, it's a great psychological thriller and falls well into my schematic of belief systems with creating one's own reality. I felt myself buoyed with the knowledge that there are nightmares, but there is also genuine joy. That, friends and fellow travelers, had eluded me for quite some time. And as the movie ends, with the protagonist freely electing to leave his cryogenic sleep even with the interactive dream being corrected to avoid frightening streams of living experience, he faces his fear of heights in the other-world and jumps. The screen opens with an eye looking at the camera and someone telling him to wake up.
Why rejoin the "real world"? Because there - in that waking awareness - can be found possibility and potential.
During these few years following the anguish of non-comprehension and the loss of faith in myself and my belief systems, I lost passion from my life stream. Fear became my adorned four-poster bed and the fairy tale I thought I desired taunted me with the thought that I might not be able...not be cognizant enough...incapable of being the hero of my own life.
It's not true. This trek through what felt like no-man's-land was a gift. My emotional shell has been purged and realigned and I am - surprising to myself - tough, but much kinder than I was before this jaunt into disillusionment. I have taken a look at my own part in the multi-act performance and can view my personal foibles, some not so minor. It's not so dramatic as placing the carcass of that dream on a burial pyre, but I have set it adrift.
Returning to where and who I was before this lesson, I am not in the same place. T.S. Eliot wrote about time, healing, apocalyptic journeys, and redemption. His quote is fitting: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
So, as with the title of Bloom's book, Love Invents Us, I am opening the gates of my heart and soul for passion in living once more. It isn't that we mirror another's desires - from the point on which I find myself now - but that we can be greater of spirit and soul with a passion in this lifting the veil of life-choice. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that "Passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant." When I view my vital statistics in this moment, I realize I am the one taking its pulse. There is energy with a hint of purpose drenched in a warm smile.
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