LOVE IS LONG... Part 2

One night after a community youth group, the young people who attended, were all saying good-night to each other in their normal way, testosterone based hugs among the guys and hugs and kisses between the guys and girls. I later heard that a group of young people were looking on and remarked to one of our workers, “there’s nuff love between your people.” Love has something about it that connects with something inside of us; we don’t always know it for sure but when we see it and experience it, we know it.

I’ve never seen love as being purely hormonal, although it can make you act in some crazily hormonal ways; I see it as stronger than just random and changeable feelings. It is principled and more concrete than its media and MTV portrayal. Love is rooted, sure about itself, even if it sometimes leaves us with the feeling that we’ll never truly know it. It cares enough to be honest and loves enough to let go. It’s clear enough not to change its mind at the first sign of trouble; but won’t stay where its abused and treated indifferently.

Love is difficult, because its boundaries are uninhibited, making us leave our places of comfort and confront what it asks of us. We realise that we don’t have all the answers as individuals but we have a heart to find them. And yet, we still remain afraid to love, because we don’t know what love is suppose to look like anymore, it seems so unstable, unsure of itself; just when we think we do know, the goal posts get shifted (literally up-rooted) and that’s why “love is long”. But that’s not Love’s fault, we’re the one’s who have played the fool with love.

So then, what do we do? How do we address this love thing???? We’ve got to renew the value we place on love and ourselves. Love is other-centered and the value we place on others must begin to reflect that. The problem with living in an age that places no importance on the past or future, is that the only person in the present you value is yourself. Love is being sold as self-love to the exclusion of all else. If there is one thing that is true, it is that people matter, with all their hopes, dreams, fears, joy and pain, they still matter.

I never grew up with a father or father figure for that matter. My dad left my mum and the rest of his children when I was 5yrs old and after 25yrs of marriage and 10 children, my mum was understandably done with love and marriage. So growing up in my house meant growing up with no real pattern or model of what emotional love between a man and woman looked like. No man, except her sons, ever brought my mum flowers; I never saw her walk hand in hand with another man, other than one of her 5 sons. I never heard her laugh than secret laugh, that lovers laugh when they’re in that private place with each other…Never!

Oh don’t get it twisted; love was strong in the family and in our home, mum had love to spare, even when there wasn’t time to love. However, the beautiful consenting love between a father and mother that makes a family whole never lived at our place.

Then the time came when it was my turn to love as a husband, father and man in my own home and I was gripped with a fearful panic. I felt that I was in danger of being as dysfunctional and destructive as my father was, because I had no real pattern or model of love, no foundation to build my home on. Then one day it hit me like daylight around the bend of a tunnel. Although I had never seen any real pattern of how love should look, in my heart, I had a sense of what it should have looked like. I knew what I deserved to see, what my life missed and my soul craved. It was knowing this, that made me build my love concept around the beauty I should have seen.
It saved my love of love, my in love-ness with love and taught me not to be fearful of losing it.

Love will give us the option to choose from the real patterns it has out there, even if we only perceive it. Love is still imprinted in the human DNA, experience, even longing and will always find way to give us a new perspective on an old saga. To what extent we choose to love, depends largely on where we’ve been with love. We still must choose to take the unpredictable, but necessary journey it offers us. I don’t know much, but I do know that if I couldn’t love, life would be seriously meaningless.

Love is a roller coaster ride. I know the twists, turns, climbs and mind numbing plunges leave us reeling, but I’d rather jump in the box car and take the ride, than be one the mug's standing by the railings watching someone else enjoy the ride.

Love is Long? na, I don’t think so…

LOVE IS LONG...Part 1

‘Long’… Oxford Dictionary: Length, appearing to be or take more time than is really the case, containing a relatively large number of parts or individual items.

‘Long’… Street Talk: Tiring, too much trouble, boring, not worth the effort.

Of all the things I love to write about but find it hard to talk about, love, ranks the highest. It’s not that I have love hang-ups, I know I’ve had my fair share of love let–downs but I mean, love. It’s hard because, what do I say about love that hasn’t already been said, written, sung, drawn, acted, enacted, danced, tattooed, what-evered! There isn’t really much, is there?

Love, the universal language and the eternal need, the all encompassing complete me, the never-ending quest, the relationship you love to hate and person you hate to remember… Love! Love has journeyed a long way, from the pen’s of ancient poets and psalmists, to modern film makers and fast food song writers…but are we all still loving it?

The problem I seem to find with the popular concept and use of the word love, is that both word and concept, have become so diluted with other additives and preservatives, that it’s potency and flavor have been lost.

We seem to be losing so much and gaining so little in the name of ‘love’; we loose our moral and sexual innocence and gain a hatred of God and Faith in the name of religiously abusive love; we lose international credibility and respect and gain unjustifiable nationalistic pride, in the name axis ideological love; we loose the forever-ness of our ‘I Dos’ and ‘I wills’ and gain divorce and C.S.A hell, in the name of hurried matrimonial love; we loose our ability to trust anyone, and gain a closeted, self preservationist attitude in the name of repeatedly ‘stabbed in the back’, friendship love.

We desperately want to believe in love and its ability to reduce our helplessness and shower us with all the great things love loves. But when we see what people, governments, institutions, artists, families, friends and even what we personally do in love’s fair name, we run and cash in whatever’s left of our love chips and find we still come up short, owing the house. Yeah, Jamie had it right the first time, “Love is Long!”

You know, as hopelessly cynical as I may sound, don’t get it twisted, I still believe in love, all of it! I believe in its ability to make the sun shine and the rain warm; I love the way it gets you all fluttery inside, every time that name shows up on your phone; I love the way you laugh and say ‘you stink’ when your partner farts but you really didn’t mind, because they farted. I love the frightening vulnerability of placing your heart in the care of a safe heart, knowing that they’ll do the same. I love the spiritual knowing of love and the emotional grounding you feel sharing yourself with the sole object of your desire. I love knowing that love has a depth and breath that gives meaning to existence, an existence that is both individually and mutually enriched when shared. That’s why we have to rescue it from the feeling of emptiness and utter abandonment many feel, just hearing the word love. As Stevie Wonder so rightly sang, “love’s in need of love today” because as a result, the old now stare at faded pictures of love, while the young grab at bubbles, trying to find and experience something real.

I was running a series of workshops for a group of young teenagers, and talked about our need to love and be loved and how essential love is to human living. There was a girl in the group who angrily challenged me about what was saying and ended her protest with “%*♯@ Love!” I later found out, that between her loveless parents and a cheating boyfriend, they had killed anything to do with love in her life. So when I talk about this love thing, I’m not being idealistically naive; I’m being seriously serious.

We spend so much time highlighting, even celebrating, all that is dysfunctional and broken in human relationships. We run soap operas in which no marriage survives, and pour scorn on the idea or image of two people being true and making it work; we have done it for so long that people now see functional faithful love as a little old and very 1960’s, so very out of step with our present reality and individualism.

So yeah, and I’m dead serious, where we see love working, we’ve got to let people see it, let them know that there is an alternative to what we’re constantly being fed. I mean, how will people learn to love, really love, unless they can see that there is something to hold on to.

Part 2 to come tomorrow

opps, I said it again...

First the royal family, now Carol Thatcher it seems like they all think in technicolor black, and speak that way too, but hey that’s them...

What’s really cheesing me off is the way we keep brushing it off these constantly recurring incidents, as racist words without the racist intent or maliciousness...I mean, how does that one work???? We cant keep brushing it off as ignorance, come on now, they’re too well educated for that and we cant really brush it off as a slip of the tongue, because generally speaking, people don’t let their tongue’s slip off in racist directions, or is it just my naivete?

The truth is people speak in the way they think. We speak about people in the way we think about them, its just the way it is. If you think of someone in terms of race you’ll address them in terms of their race. Now I know that we can get so comfortable with the way we think about people and so used to thinking that way, that we speak privately uttered, but never publicly said words, as in the case of Carol Thatcher. I think the principle is, ‘what a person thinks in the privacy of their mind, they will act and speak in publicly’ sorry Carol...

Royal Clowns..

So is Prince Harry a racist, na, he’s a irresponsible clown, who doesn’t yet get, that his birth has responsibility attached to it and if doesn't want that responsibility, then he should renounce his title, stop ponceing off the state and he’ll be free to be an irresponsible idiot at his own expense and not mine. Is his father Prince Charles a racist? No, he’s allowed empire illusions to breed in him an over familiarity with his “darker friends”, thinking that they don’t mind him calling them whatever best describes their race and not their person...What of the Duke of Windsor, is he a racist.........???? Ummmmmmmmmmmm!

Then there’s our recently and sacked and publicly embarrassed Carol Thatcher, is she a racist?? Well, if a person speaks in private homophobic terms but not public terms are they still homophobic? Or if a person speaks in private misogynistic terms but never public terms are they still misogynists? Or maybe the get out clause is, it only counts when you get caught or make privately public gaffs thinking everyone will understand cos you do it with your friends all they time?

I think the worst thing we can do is brush off what happens in these situations as an innocent slip of the tongue. It adds further insult to the injury already inflicted not because the person should know better but because we know thats how the person really thinks. So what do we do? Do we just keep a lid on our public and private P’s & Q’s in order not to get caught out? Do we hold PR classes on how to hide our true self from the watching world and only let them see what we want them to see? I really don’t think the issue is one of simply watching the way we speak about people, its about assessing the way we think about people. Its about asking ourselves why we choose to think of them in a particular way and why we would ever feel justified in publicly addressing them in that way, as in the case of these very public individuals.

The one unforgiving and regrettable thing they hold in common is that they see people of color and ethnicity, primarily in terms of their color and ethnicity and determine their worth and value primarily from that basis. Call it racism, call it classism, call it elitism, hey you can even call it, them-ism but please don’t insult the people you insult any further, by dismissing it as simply something regrettable but nothing to get in a stink about...

“BLOGGING-HELL”

Is this a bloggers universe or what! I mean, blogging-hell, where did we all come from and why do we have so much to say?

Is this the fulfillment of Andy Whahol’s 15 mins of fame prophecy?? Who knows, anyway, whatever, we’ve blogged up cyberspace with our pro’s and cons, each posting like a satellite beaming down on to screens the world over. It seems like, in a search for something real, people are turning to the blogged out world of blogging bloggers...blogging-ada!

A whole world of everyday random people, placing ideas, dreams, frustrations, beliefs, loves, hates, fears, triumphs, families and of course, etc etc etc out there for all to connect with. Blogging in the hope that someone, somewhere in our universe will uncover our ideals, dreams, visions and thoughts and somehow relate. We so very much love the notion that some random person on the other side of the globe, or even more surprisingly, at the other end of our street, thinks the way we do. The lives of people in jigsaw-blog pieces, that we read and place into the parts of our lives that fit.

As the voice of the collective individual, blogs will remain the way in which we kriss-cross each others lives and leave something of ourselves wherever and whenever people read our words. If we write more, them we’ll speak more and share more and grow more and maybe at the end of it all, we’ll be become more as individuals and as a society, or is just my 4th decaf caramel macchiato with soya milk kicking in?? Go on then mate, blog on!

The Certainty of Doubt...

I’m watching Bill Maher’s ‘Religulous’, and he says that he’s in the business of doubt. He said that christians sell certainty, while he sells doubt, but he says it and sells it with the same certainty that a christian sells certainty; I mean he speaks and religulously sells his absolute faith in doubt, conviction of doubt, and certainty of doubt, like a man of religulous certainty...doesn’t that make him a man of faith in doudt, or am I just being religulously, religulous?