Skeleton Woman
According to Clarissa Pinkola-Estés, there are seven phases of love, and there is this:
"Wolves are good at relationships. Anyone who has observed wolves sees how deeply they bond. Mates are most often for life. Even though they clash, even though there is dissension, their bonds carry them over through harsh winters, plentiful springs, long walks, new offspring, old predators, tribal dances, and group sings... If we were to use archetypal terms to describe what determines the strong bonds among wolves, we might surmise that the integrity of their relationships is derived from their submission to the ancient Life/Death/Life nature.
The Life/Death/Life nature is a cycle of animation, development, decline, and death that is always followed by reanimation. This cycle affects all physical life and all facets of psychological life. Everything--the sun, novas, and the moon, as well as the affairs of humans and those of the tiniest creatures, like cells and atoms--has this fluttering, then faltering, then fluttering again."
The story of the Skeleton Woman comes from the circumpolar regions of the world, where love is conceptualized not as a "romantic tryst between two lovers" but rather the "union of two beings whose strength together enables one or both to enter into communication with the soul-world and to participate in fate as a dance with life and death." I think that's beautiful, but another way I'm tempted to conceptualize is a little more simplistic - it's survival. Moving through the world as a single person, leaving finally the nest and protection of one's birth family, the function of a partner is brought into focus and clarity. Fulfillment of desire - "desire" - is no longer the objective; that immediately is downgraded to the frivolous.
The modern Western world is strange in so many ways. The vast majority of us probably won't ever have to realistically worry about food and shelter. Life is comparably easy yet still, curiously, difficult. Is that because we aren't operating in the environment we evolved in? It is less necessary to unify because the physical wildness of our environment has diminished; "tamed" and "subdued", as the capitalists would have it. Survival in this world is determined largely if not exclusively by the presence or absence of income/money. But we are still programmed to unite, even if for a survival need hidden deep beneath our roads and grids, nearly out of the reach of our imaginations. It is no wonder that relationships between men and women are so convoluted, confused, and bizarre these days. We gravitate towards each other without an understanding of why. We say to have a family, to procreate, simply to be with someone, to maintain the flow of generations, to move into the future. But not to survive in this world right now, to increase the chance of being here tomorrow, to make it through the winter or all the way to the end, when we are finally old and it is the good time to die. The closest a constitutional marriage comes to having a survival function is the tax breaks, the monetary reward, and that is hardly something that we can feel, draw strength from, reflect upon and grow together around. It enables us to buy a bigger house, more clothes, a car. A marriage partnership in the modern world is little more than a streamlined means to material (in)ecstasy. I suppose that's why everyone gets divorced and cites unfulfillment and disatisfaction as their reasons.
That said, being in the heavily populated, intensely urban, industrial heart of this civilization-machine that seems at any moment capable of eating a person alive (riding a bicycle across the Manhattan Bridge alongside the trains is always supremely intense and reminds me of my incredibly soft and mortal existence) heightens my concept and appreciation of partnership. It is not a self-serving, pleasure endeavor as it appears in a protected, controlled, or cushioned life, but a functional, essential endeavor, so that the purpose of partnership is realigned with survival. And physical survival is inevitably also spiritual survival. To move through the world as a unit rather than charting the course and going alone is life affirming and strengthening in a necessary way. For me now, relationships are not just extraneous life options based on pleasure fulfillment, but necessary components of living.
"Rational psyche goes fishing for something deep and not only lands it but is so shocked it can barely stand it," Pinkola-Estés writes of confrontation with the Life/Death/Life nature in early love.
song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-nWP_RWFLk
"Wolves are good at relationships. Anyone who has observed wolves sees how deeply they bond. Mates are most often for life. Even though they clash, even though there is dissension, their bonds carry them over through harsh winters, plentiful springs, long walks, new offspring, old predators, tribal dances, and group sings... If we were to use archetypal terms to describe what determines the strong bonds among wolves, we might surmise that the integrity of their relationships is derived from their submission to the ancient Life/Death/Life nature.
The Life/Death/Life nature is a cycle of animation, development, decline, and death that is always followed by reanimation. This cycle affects all physical life and all facets of psychological life. Everything--the sun, novas, and the moon, as well as the affairs of humans and those of the tiniest creatures, like cells and atoms--has this fluttering, then faltering, then fluttering again."
The story of the Skeleton Woman comes from the circumpolar regions of the world, where love is conceptualized not as a "romantic tryst between two lovers" but rather the "union of two beings whose strength together enables one or both to enter into communication with the soul-world and to participate in fate as a dance with life and death." I think that's beautiful, but another way I'm tempted to conceptualize is a little more simplistic - it's survival. Moving through the world as a single person, leaving finally the nest and protection of one's birth family, the function of a partner is brought into focus and clarity. Fulfillment of desire - "desire" - is no longer the objective; that immediately is downgraded to the frivolous.
The modern Western world is strange in so many ways. The vast majority of us probably won't ever have to realistically worry about food and shelter. Life is comparably easy yet still, curiously, difficult. Is that because we aren't operating in the environment we evolved in? It is less necessary to unify because the physical wildness of our environment has diminished; "tamed" and "subdued", as the capitalists would have it. Survival in this world is determined largely if not exclusively by the presence or absence of income/money. But we are still programmed to unite, even if for a survival need hidden deep beneath our roads and grids, nearly out of the reach of our imaginations. It is no wonder that relationships between men and women are so convoluted, confused, and bizarre these days. We gravitate towards each other without an understanding of why. We say to have a family, to procreate, simply to be with someone, to maintain the flow of generations, to move into the future. But not to survive in this world right now, to increase the chance of being here tomorrow, to make it through the winter or all the way to the end, when we are finally old and it is the good time to die. The closest a constitutional marriage comes to having a survival function is the tax breaks, the monetary reward, and that is hardly something that we can feel, draw strength from, reflect upon and grow together around. It enables us to buy a bigger house, more clothes, a car. A marriage partnership in the modern world is little more than a streamlined means to material (in)ecstasy. I suppose that's why everyone gets divorced and cites unfulfillment and disatisfaction as their reasons.
That said, being in the heavily populated, intensely urban, industrial heart of this civilization-machine that seems at any moment capable of eating a person alive (riding a bicycle across the Manhattan Bridge alongside the trains is always supremely intense and reminds me of my incredibly soft and mortal existence) heightens my concept and appreciation of partnership. It is not a self-serving, pleasure endeavor as it appears in a protected, controlled, or cushioned life, but a functional, essential endeavor, so that the purpose of partnership is realigned with survival. And physical survival is inevitably also spiritual survival. To move through the world as a unit rather than charting the course and going alone is life affirming and strengthening in a necessary way. For me now, relationships are not just extraneous life options based on pleasure fulfillment, but necessary components of living.
"Rational psyche goes fishing for something deep and not only lands it but is so shocked it can barely stand it," Pinkola-Estés writes of confrontation with the Life/Death/Life nature in early love.
song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-nWP_RWFLk