04/16/2000
Love is. Period. Ah penny, brown penny, brown penny. I am looped in the loops of her hair. (Yeates) Mike Joyce here! This just in!- - - It's a beautiful day today here at the UNC-Greensboro campus. Maybe it's my perspective or maybe I'm tangled in an even bigger web. You see...I spent a wonderful day with a wonderful girl yester-evening (Mon. 27th). And it all has made Yours Truly take a step back and reflect. It seems that she lives an hour & a half away at UNC-Chapel Hill, and that our schedules almost never compliment the others'. It's a weird thing because I miss 'er already. I'm going crazy and it's a marvelous sensation. It is like when someone gets a cast and someone hands you one of those special scratchers....or when you get a haircut and those fallen hairs are itching your neck like crazy, but then the barber comes along with that soft hairbrush.
However....dancing back to the main point...once one's exposed to something this extraordinary, it brings upon an even bigger burden than hunger or thirst. That of yearning. I guess it's typical...this behavior. It's as if it's imbedded in my genetic make-up...consumed by my entire psyche. Is it better to have something/someone close-at-hand, or is it better to accept the saying that "absence makes the heart grow fonder?" Good question. I'm not coming up with any answers. You see...your narrator has never fully grasped the whole "proximity gig." I've always looked for girls in the 'here'...instead I've fount them in the 'there'. Maybe I am just hung up in the whole "greener pastures" mentality simply due to luck (with those women). It's hard to just sit back and let Fate play its' hand....to become the voodoo child of the god(s). Because looking back at my relationships with women, they have never been close enough for me. They were/are either 'out-there physically' or 'out-there mentally,' both as a result of the other, or just both!
Often in life I am confronted with this metaphysical conundrum. And none can be more confusing and painful than, what psychologist call "storge" (a friendship love). You meet someone new, or maybe you even see someone in a new light...all of a sudden you are attached!...dependent upon someone's affection to satisfy your desire to be with someone. But, we as human being can not change the fact that we are magnetized towards our innerself's fancy. Girls do it to me all the time....amid the exterior beauty....behind that primeval phenomenon...there it is!...something that captivates me (and my fellow men). It can range from a gentle sigh, to a burst of laughter...the nape of the neck, to the way she curls her fingers around yours. It transforms you. Your body, like a harp and her words and gestures are like fingers running upon the wires. (James Joyce). And yet another truth along the avenues of love is that It shows no prejudice, be it race, color or gender (or all the above). I mean...could just as easily fall in love with a Jewish girl as I would an Islamic. Good ol' Will put it to us this way, "Love looks not with eye but with mind, And therefore is the wing'd Cupid painted blind."
In Zen archery...the practitioner doesn't really "aim" at the target. Instead, he "becomes one" with it first. Some say that in your quest to find a life partner...."aiming" can mess you up. I'd like to put this theory to rest, so-to-speak, because there is no real logic to it. I believe that people who say, "Someone special will come, but you must not search," is full of the proverbial balony. I am a firm believer in Fate...so automatically, my stance on the matter is nothing will hurt you. What is already laid out for you will become apparent in due time. However, I've taken that so-called advice before and I've only recieved the company of the television. However, once you find your "other half"...that destined soul-mate...it is definitely something to clutch on to. And how should one love? By feeling...by connecting...this, on all levels. How is it that you keep the one we love? By learning not to possess. Once we feel that we have to "keep" someone, we lose that very bonding quality. True love is mutual, and neither of the two lovers must feel the need to retain their love. Simply cherish one another.
--- We should look at love in the same context as we look at the world. We should not pretend to understand the world only through intellect...and thus, we shouldn't look at love that way either. We understand it more by "feeling." Once you lose the ability to "feel", you lose the ability to love. But it's there for the taken. It's a gift given to us prewrapped at birth. And once you are able to recognize the gift....when love is in one's heart, you can then see things (life) as they truly are....infinite.
And for those who think love is a crock, nature will eventually prove wrong. It's true. There are actually those who deligently deny the word...and there are those who believe that they would have to be crazy to get swept up in love's madness. However....while you wanna think that it's something in the winds, or something in the water...it just turns out that we're all bonkers. "The question, O me! so sad, recurring--What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here--that life exists, and identity; That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse."(Walt Whitman) Oh ecstasy, I welcome thee!
~Thomas M. Joyce