Are You Ready For The Challenges of Love?
As if life was not complicated enough ... in addition to the critical tasks of love, there are major challenges to be overcome.
These challenges can seem to rise up like the manu headed Hydra, but often the samechallenges appear in differentguy.seys ... the names and circumstances changed to see if yo really have mastered the skills and attitudes that will not lead you astray.
So what are these challenges? Well. here are a few ... see if any of them ring any bells ...
Love Your Enemy
There are no means of safety against superior
qualities of another person
but to love him.
- Goethe
Ancient Wisdom about Love's Great Lesson
It can seem a very hard row to how, that you are supposed to love your enemies ... the ones who are trying to hurt you or the ones you love ... or destroy the things and principles you love and would die for.
From people who burn flags ... to those who burn people in effigy ... it can be hard to turn the other cheek when you know the first time was no accident.
So exactly what does "love your enemies" really mean?
I think there is much to be gained from understanding the world from your enemies point of view. People go to war for many reasons, but at the heart of it is the idea of injustice and the need to survive.
We can all understand the parent who is caught stealing to feed their hungry and starving children. Seeing your children crying and dying of starvation, at the brink of survival -- can change your values. Life has a higher value than the rights of property owners. Those property owners, if put into the same situation, might do the same for their children.
If your enemies are starving to death -- loving them means feeding them, and then going the extra mile and teaching them to feed themselves. You can feed a man a fish, teach him how to fish, or show him how to build a fishing industry that will feed and employ thousands.
It all depends on whether you are focused on helping him to survive, be sustainable, or thrive. The first makes him dependent on you. The second makes him dependent on himself. The third makes him a trading partner.
The funny thing is ... strong trading partners rarely go to war. Its the ones who are kept away from the trading table that go to war .. usually to get what they desperately need to survive but cannot buy, trade or steal. Stealing, such as the annexing of Faulkin Islands, the oil fields of Kuwait, and the breadbasket of Poland -- are all moves of desperate people who can not buy -- or can not afford -- the things they need to survive (or thrive in a changing world). So they steal what they need, or use it to acquire the leverage to get what they want.
If you loved someone, you would not let them starve. Or go without medical care. Or remain ignorant and poor.
Watching good people suffer and doing nothing when everything they need is within your power -- that creates enemies. Like watching a house burn down while refusing to lend a hose to your neighbor.
So, why turn someone into an enemy by letting them starve? Why let a generation of spirited children grow up in a world that only offers poverty, disease and death? Why let all the human potential in the world lie fallow in the field when all it would take is a little love to get things growing?
Teach a man how to fish and you have a friend for Life.
Turn your enemies in ... to adversaries that allow you to express all the compassion and good will you can muster. And when you have together waged war on poverty, disease and ignorance ... you will have found the common enemy that unites you both.
Recognize Love In all Its Forms ...
If you are a three minute egg, love is the knock at the door that breaks you wide open.
_ The Wise Woman
If you do see Love in all its forms, you will learn how much love there is in the World ... and discover why it hides right under your nose. Often we only recognize love when it hits us right between the eyes ... but the third eye is often the one most challenging to our sense of Self and who we are.
Love seems to appear out of nowhere, and then when it leaves, that is where it seems to go -- leaving us changed. Love is great at helping us evolve, but some of us take it for granted, while others feel life is not worth living withoput it.
The form love comes in varies, and sometimes it is hard to recognise it when it lurks behind a veil of hatred or loathing. But what we hate is an invitation to love, to peak behind the veil and discover what has us all up in arms, ready to do battle for the sake of the values, ideas and principles that we love and are passionate about -- whether that is honor, country, or the transcendent.
Some call love a temptress, but more important than the name is what we are being called to do or become. Is is what we dream of and long for, or is it a nightmare of contradictions and having to face what we have hidden from ourselves?
Love, like The Wise Woman, takes many forms in order to help us see ourselves as we really are, and begin the work of evolving into who we want to become.
And that is a big task in itself.
Making love out of nothing at all ...
What is it that draws our heart to another? From what essential ingredients does love arise? Does chemistry have a place in the alchemy of Love?
Making love out of No Thing speaks to the core of what love is and can do. Is love an effective agent of change, breaking down the door of the status quo and out moded ways of being and living, of thinking and feeling? Does our passion help us build bridges to the future we all want to live in?
Some people think of love as a force of Mother Nature, others see it as a power weilded by the Universe. A sword to cut away all the baggage we have collected through our travels and life lessons -- freeing us from the past and opening up the future, making the present a sweet place to dwell among all the possibilities before us, stretching out all the memories that lie before us that we have yet to make real.
If love is no Thing, then it might be one of those intangibles that make life wonderful and can never be taken away or diminish with time. Always circulating around the globe, love is in the Air, passion is what sets us on Fire to follow our dreams and the Water of Life flows and Falls on a current of love.
We may not be able to see it directly, but it is reflected in the glow of someone in love. We can feel it when we are in love ourselves - with someone or with life. And we can hear it in the voice of passion that comes when someone is doing or sharing what they love.
