LOVE & HATE

Why do marriages that began so lovingly
Turn acid so quickly when the partnership dis-integrates?

Well, it's possible that we were kidding ourselves;
Maybe we weren't as "integrated"
As our hormones and romantic fantasies
Led us to believe.

But I've come today with something far more fundamental than that --
The duality of Love, and whatever its polar opposite may be for us.
No mater how flat you squash a coin, it still has two sides --
Heads and tails.
In this realm, everything has an opposite.
The opposite of "love" can be "indifference", "loathing", "obsession", "lust".....
We all have lot of "love-opposites" in our personal lexicon.
But, for the sake of simplicity just for now,
Let's use a common code-word -- "hate" to signify whatever the antithesis of "love" is for us......

Romantic love carries within it
The seeds of its own termination. 

In Love (as a context)
We "fall in love",
Which is a more romantic way of saying
We adopt a position we call "love",
Along with a lot of attendant feelings, emotions, hopes, expectations, ideals, beliefs and opinions
About what the experience should feel like
And how it should go.
Because a lot of the stuff we have wrapped around "love" is positional,
Falling in love also means "falling in hate",
At one and the same moment,
We just didn't see that at the time,
And we would have resisted anyone who tried to point it out to us. Right?

[It's also worth noting that when we decide to "hate" someone or something,
We have also fallen in "love", at least with our idea of it.
I got this lesson at the hands of a Swiss-German arsehole
Who was in my face daily for over 5 years.
Lessons don't come much harder than that!]

If we can get a handle on what is going on
With this Love/Hate thing,
We're less likely to get spooked
By the inevitable surprises that arise from ignorance.
Love and hate are the obverse of each other;
Neither can exist without the other.
At the outset of loving,
The hate may not be visible,
But it is there:
At the outset of "hate",
It takes a rare kind of vision to see the loving that underpins it
And you may have to take it on trust, as I did for many years,
Until I could see it.
But in a world of duality,
The polar opposites of everything are there --
Just biding for a climate change to reveal their presence.

Through meditation comes a very different kind of love,
A kind of love that we cannot "fall into" or "fall out of".
I find this kind of love impossible to describe,
But talking "about" it, I feel it like a compassionate one-ness
Which I rise to meet, rather than "fall into".
It descends/envelops when I integrate good and bad, love and its opposite.
God and demon.
A Meditation of Acceptance and Surrender
Helps to synthesize and complete.
We reach a quality of being
That has no opposite to it
Because it is the Yes-ful Ah-ness of all opposites.