The Forbidden Kingdom

"For as love crowns you, so he will crucify you." - Kahlil Gibran

Love, in all its forms, all its stages, of grief, heartache, beauty and endurance is what keeps life moving. To move forward to the ancients, meant going backwards, and this can often be the case in love. We are faced with situations and feelings we thought that we had left behind in adolescence, but here may be the clue, that we think we know love. Heraclitus said that, "Of [the] soul you shall never find boundaries, not if you track it on every path; so deep is its cause." I believe that the same is true for love. We long for the butterflies, excitement and exhaustion, all symptoms of the arrow piercing our flesh, to last forever, but this is akin to becoming stuck in a waiting room. If we remain here, we will never know what treasures lie beyond. There is no coming to consciousness without pain. Passion is a flame that gives both a tender heat and a searing burn. We can easily be destroyed by our art as much as a relationship.

The mystics speak of the great longing that causes our heart to ache, that makes us feel like the "reed torn from the reed bed." Some say that the longing is our call being answered. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. Some spend their whole lives wandering throughout the world in search of another who sings the same soul song as their own. The problem is that, maybe, there is no one out there for us, or perhaps there is but they do not recognise it. All that can be done is to look inward, as the Hermeticists did, when they endeavoured to unite the dark seductive and intense energy of the feminine, with the light of reason found in the masculine. We can of course heal each other, but we should be able to mingle our strengths and weaknesses together.

To come to know the secrets of your heart is terrifying. To recognise them in someone else, is even more so, and many are frightened away by the sacrifice that love demands. There is never any guarantee, and if it loses its wings, then it loses its purpose. Functionality kills the zeal and sincerity that we must try to keep. It is so hard when you are faced with failure, faced with the many knock backs that life will deal you. It is so often here that we remain lonely and dejected in the city, by the shore, or in the arms of another. People hurt us, and we cannot understand why. For all our capacity for communication, I myself, and many others fail spectacularly at it. My anxiety causes me to say the wrong thing, to chose the wrong words and ultimately lose it all.

Beauty and love seem inextricably woven, but when you embrace the roses, you too shall be pierced by its thorns. Love causes an "earthquake of the soul." it shows us in no uncertain terms our own imperfections. This shows us also that perfection doesn't exist. None of us are perfect, but we are perfect in our imperfectness. This is the furnace where we are broken or strengthened.

Myth tells us that Eros was the lonely god of love. His story, just as 'East of the Sun, West of the Moon,' and 'Beauty and the Beast', all show us the painful, but ultimately worth it, metamorphosis that love brings. It does not end with the final page, it is a union, a natural compulsion to create that goes on forever. This is reflected in the alchemical marriage of the sun and moon, of heart and head, spirit and soul, and matter and psyche.

I don't feel that we will ever be complete because we are forever learning from the lessons life throws at us. In light of this, perhaps all we can do is to dare to hope, to offer, even if it is not understood by others, beauty, kindness and love into our harsh world. Honour, freedom and tenderness are the keystones, and this is echoed by the twentieth philosopher Alan Watts: "When you love someone you say to that person. Look, I love you, whatever that may be. I've seen quite a bit of it and I know there's lots that I haven't seen, but still it's you and I want you to be what you want to be. And I won't be happy if I've got you in a cage. You'd be a bird without song."

Everything being said and done, still hold out for it in everything you do, for:

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"A soul that sees beauty may sometimes walk alone.

For the world has given up on beauty. It doesn’t believe in fairytales anymore, or happy endings.

So a soul that sees beauty is a soul thought to be insane by the majority. They call it stuck up, delusional, and abnormal – all because it sees something better that it can hold out for.

But, if my words mean anything – hold out for that beauty. Walk alone until you grab it. The pain of walking alone against the stream is worth it."

~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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