13-02-2018, 09:23 PM
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The Perfect Metaphor for Love
After my divorce in 2011, followed by a few tumultuous attempts at virtual dating, and ending with an extremely dangerous dalliance, I gave up, realizing I knew nothing about love and relationships, and told myself that if I ever was given another shot at it, I first needed to move away from the ‘Land of Women’.
I then plunged into a months-long study on love, romance, sexuality, eroticism, relationships, and the personal unconscious. I ran the gamut, starting with the evolutionary origins of human sexuality, to the often-sexless courtship of Medieval troubadours, all the way to our current age of excarnation, hook-ups, serial monogamy, polyamory, and digitized vaginas. I vowed that if I was to have one last shot at love, I was going to be fully prepared, and walk into it with eyes wide open.
I figured that if we are required to study seven-to-ten years to become doctors, for example, or eight to practice law, we should at least dedicate some time to one of the most important aspects of our lives and our humanity. I also knew that I needed to explore the unconscious feelings that surrounded my ideas of women, to dispel false — or twisted — mystifications. If you consider my background, you’ll see what I mean.
“How are you?”
We had dated for two years while I lived in Costa Rica in my early twenties. Thirty years had passed since we last heard of one another.
I did not feel fully prepared, but so many serendipities were occurring in my life at that point that I considered her message as another sign from the universe. I seized it, we picked up right from where we started, and have been in a wonderful relationship ever since.
Meant to be? Is it true love? Is she my “other half” Plato proposes in the Androgyne Myth?
Genealogy and ancestry are now big business. People are hungry to know where they come from. I prefer to trace the ancestry of our ideas — our cultural DNA. We are the intellectual offspring of the ancient Greeks.
In a nutshell, the myth explains that long ago, there were three genders: male, female, and androgynous. Males were descended from the sun, females from the earth, and those who were androgynous, descended from the moon. They were powerful and vigorous and made threatening attacks on the gods. The gods did not want to destroy them because they would then forfeit the sacrifices humans made to them, so Zeus (the Sky-God of Indo-Europeans) decided to cut each person in two. Because they longed for their original nature, people kept trying to find their other half and reunite with it. When found, they would embrace and stay together, not wanting anything else.
Sweet, but it sounded too cloying and absorbing. I also suspected that the myth had less to do with relationships, and more with the split between our female and male essences I discussed in Part II of my Series on Objectification.
Having unwittingly surrendered my sovereignty — my ‘Inner King’ — during my marriage, the idea of “losing myself”, or melting into another, as the myth says, was not something I wanted in a future relationship.
In my studies, I came across this vow, proposed by Sam Keen:
“Already whole, we will not look for the other to complete us. Rather, we will look for the other to complement us.”
And that was that…for a while.
But something kept nagging at me: neither the myth nor Sam Keen explained what both halves were coming together for.
I dug deeper, finding this quote from the renowned American mythologist Joseph Campbell, best known for his work in comparative mythology and religion:
“Marriage is a recognition of a spiritual identity.”
That did not help much either.
What does that “spiritual identity” look and feel like? What is the “synthesis” Keen suggests a couple must arrive at through “the sweet agony of dialogue, the contest of conversation, the dialectic of love”?
Then my girlfriend’s daughter announced her wedding.
Having little money to gift her, I decided to create a recipe box, and in it, I included the quotes on love and relationships I felt could guide the newlyweds when struck by the inevitable conflicts that arise in a long-term, committed relationship.
This one made a lasting impression in my mind:
A few weeks ago, I flew down to Costa Rica to visit my girlfriend and attend her son’s high school graduation. The day after the ceremony, we drove north to the province of Guanacaste, and trekked high-up into the cloud-forest of the Volcán Tenorio National Park.
The night before, we hiked the path leading from our small hotel to a river at the base of the park. I was stunned when we got to its end, having never seen water of this intense blue before.
Its name is Rio Celeste. Sky Blue River.
“Overflowing, Alive, Joyous!” The phrase of the quote I had included in the recipe box rang in my head. I was eager to climb up the top and reach the river’s springhead.
We left very early the next morning. It had rained hard the night before, and it was still drizzling and overcast when we reached the base of the trail. An hour into the hike, I was glad I listened to my girlfriend, and had rented rain boots and ponchos from an enterprising ‘Tico’ who operated a makeshift stall by the parking lot.
Midway up the mountain, we reached a tranquil section of Rio Celeste where the water’s vibrant color makes you understand how it got its name.
We kept going; sloughing across the narrow trail, bruised and scraped, knee-deep in mud, calves burning by then; both realizing, in silence, that age was taking its toll on our tired bodies (she’s 51 — I’m 55).
She walked ahead of me, and seeing her bravely forging ahead, I recalled the fifteen reasons (and counting) I’ve compiled on why, every single day, I make the conscious choice to be with her. One of them stems from this phrase in German: “Jemand mit dem man Pferde stehlen kann”: She is someone with whom one can steal horses — daring, adventurous, insouciant; she has my back, as I do hers.
We were exhausted when we reached this crossroad:
But we decided to climb the remaining 3000 feet to ‘Teñideros’: the place where Rio Celeste is born.
It didn’t hit me at first.
Of course, I was intellectually intrigued by the ‘alchemical magic’ created by the confluence of two ordinary rivers — the clear one to the left, with the mineral-rich, white one in the middle — producing, in their joint flow, such an unbelievable, ethereal blueness.
It wasn’t until I returned home and received the prints of the photos I had taken on our journey that I was struck.
I had found it! The perfect, visual metaphor for love in a committed relationship.
And my memory instantly connected that visual, with the recipe I had given my girlfriend’s daughter:
“Love is an art, an activity. It is a standing in, not a falling for. It is primarily giving, not receiving; giving as the highest expression of potency, experiencing oneself as Overflowing, Alive, Joyous!”
I also made the connection with the “synthesis” Sam Keen alluded to:
Syn·the·sis (noun): the combination of ideas to form a theory or system.
So I sent my girlfriend that last photo with this letter:
“Upon receiving the photos of our fascinating trek to Rio Celeste, this one has kept me thinking about us.
Why?
Because in it, I visualize the combination of your feminine essence (the earthy and mineral) with my masculine (crystalline) one, producing in their interlacement, something much more beautiful and meaningful than on their own.
It is a visual metaphor for two persons, singular, becoming one person, plural.
Both rivers, merging in that intense and vibrant blueness, have not lost one atom of their singularity. None has absorbed the other. They join to give rise to a new expression of their natures. They combine the best of each other in a new riverbed — a joined enterprise — that by themselves, they could never fashion.
Now they flow together, singing their joys, gurgling their newfound passion, carving in their drift new landscapes and a common future, as they meander towards that final, salty embrace with the sea.
I love realizing that together, we are creating our own Sky Blue River.”
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