In my A to Z of Becoming, I’ve reached “L” again, and so the chance to contemplate LOVE again.
I had a dream a couple of weeks ago. I won’t tell the whole dream here, but the relevant part is that in this dream I heard a voice. You know how sometimes in a dream there is a voice, not coming from a character in the dream but clear all the same, maybe like the voice of the narrator in a movie, or maybe your own voice in your own head. The voice said
“Love, the greatest creative force in the Universe. Love, the greatest destructive force in the Universe”
Then I woke up.
The creative force I understand. I’m comfortable with that. It seems to me that love is necessary to build relationships which are mutually beneficial (the essence of “integration”, the creation of mutually beneficial bonds). I can see that love is a law of attraction. Even as two molecules come together, what binds them and so creates a more complex compound, is affinity and attraction. Aren’t they qualities of love? At the level of molecules we aren’t thinking about consciousness of course, but in the story of the Universe from the time of only hydrogen molecules, through the creation of stars and planets, to the emergence of Life on Earth, and on towards the creation of human beings with consciousness, we see an ever increasing complexity, uniqueness and diversity from the constant creation of affinities, attractions and integrative bonds.
But the destructive force? That bothered me, and it popped into my head many times in the following days. Then I had the thought……on this planet Earth, as far as we know, from the time the world was created, there have been no new atoms. Every object, every plant, every animal, every person who exists today is created from the exact same atoms which have created every object, every plant, every animal and every person who existed before us.
Nature, and the Universe, create by breaking down what exists to make new objects and new life.
So, if love is THE creative force, then it too can be seen to be a destructive one. It’s just that those terms are value laden terms for us – one good, one bad, or one positive and one negative – and so opposites. But if love is both of these then maybe this judging and placing into opposite categories is stopping us from seeing the inter-connectedness of everything.
Then, this week I got a copy of Mary Oliver’s “A Thousand Mornings”, and in that collection of poems is one entitled “Lines written in the days of growing darkness”. In that poem are these lines –
And therefore
who would cry out
to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married
to the vitality of what will be?
[…] There’s love. Love comes with a desire to make connections and with an intention to care, or at very least, not to harm – and that applies in relation to plants and animals as much as to other human beings. How often does it seem to be that when your intention is a loving one, that you meet the same response? When I was a GP, my partners and I built a new clinic and the reception was an open one – no glass or metal barriers between the patients and the staff. We were warned that we’d be vulnerable to being attacked. It never happened. Not even remotely. […]