Fear is the Heart of Love ....
Love is what we make of it. Nothing more and nothing less. Having said that my theory of love goes like this - we ... all of us people ( well atleast most of us if we want to get a bit argumentative ), only fall in love with three people in our lifetime. Anything more ... well needs to be studied further and anything less ... you are damn lucky I say !!!! And yes each of these loves are needed in our lives for a season for a reason.
Most of our first love happens when we are very young , too young even. High School Love - the idealistic love that is so very often just what floats into our life from the pages of a fairy tale book.
Most of the time this is the kind of love that appeals to what love should look like and what we should be doing. We enter into it with the belief that this will be our only love and it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t feel quite right, or if we find ourselves having to swallow down our personal truths to make it work because deep down we believe that this is what love is supposed to be.
This type of love is mostly based on curiosity about the opposite gender, need for diversion from the the then real pressures of studies and building up a future, the necessity for an outflow for raging hormones that break out every now and then , the firm belief that no one understands us except for this one person we have found or has found us.
Because in this type of love what matters is not what we feel but what looks right. It's a love that most of us out grow.
Our second love is supposed to be our hard love-the one that teaches us lessons about who we are and how we often want or need to be loved. This is the kind of love that hurts. The kind of love based on who would be acceptable to us, our parents , the society even probably.
So more often we think we are charting a course different from our heart breaking first. But in reality we are still making choices out of the need to learn lessons.Isn't that what life is all about. Our second love can become a cycle, oftentimes one we keep repeating because we think that somehow the ending will be different than the first time. After all we are no longer giggling , awkward , inexperienced youngsters we were back then. And yet, each time we try, it somehow ends worse than before.
This type of love will most likely entail high levels of drama. And this perhaps is exactly what keeps us addicted to this storyline - the emotional rollercoaster of extreme highs and lows and like a junkie trying to get a fix, we stick through the lows with the expectation of the high.
With this kind of love, trying to make it work becomes more important than whether it actually should. It’s the love that we wished was right.
And then our third love is the love we never see coming. The one that usually looks all wrong for us and that destroys any lingering ideals we clung to about what love is supposed to be. This is the love that comes crashing in so easily that it feels almost surreal and impossible. It’s the kind where the connection can’t be explained and knocks us off our feet because we never planned for it.
The soul mate theories would blend in perfectly in this type of love. This is the love where we come together with someone and it just fits-there aren’t any ideal expectations about how each person should be acting, nor is there pressure to become someone other than we are.
This is kind of love that gives us the awesome feeling of simply being accepted for who we are already-and it shakes us to our core.
Maybe we don’t all experience these loves in this lifetime, and perhaps that’s just because we aren’t ready to. Maybe the reality is we need to truly learn what love isn’t before we can grasp what it is.
Of course there are those love stories that didn't have to pass through all these stages. The first time that took their breath away passionately lasted till their last breath.
When we talk of love we have to talk about monuments of love. Atleast I have to because I finally reached that stage where my theories on what love ought to be have been proved in practice. And so I finally made the trip to see the most famous monument for love in the world ... The Taj Mahal at Agra in India.
The Taj Mahal is a dedication of love by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan to his wife Mumtaz Mahal. The story goes thus - Like many of his predecessors, Shah Jahan married several wives over the course of his adult life. Although Shah Jahan spread his heart around, none of these ladies found quite the same favor as his third wife (but first love), Arjumand Banu Begum, more famously known as Mumtaz Mahal. History says he was so enamoured by her that he killed her first husband in war to take her as his bride. She was his wife , friend , lover and companion. It is said she was by his side at all times. Their union lasted 19 years and led to the birth of 14 children. Complications during the birth of the final child led to Mahal’s untimely passing at the age of 39. Shah Jahan was so stricken by the loss of his longtime companion that he decided to memorialize Mumtaz Mahal with a spectacular tomb. Construction on the Mahal and its surroundings began in 1632, one year after her death, and continued for just over two decades. It was completed in 22 years and involved effort and labour of 20,000 men and 1000 elephants at an astronomical cost even by the standards of those times.
The Taj Mahal being the dedication and homage of Mumtaz Mahal, it has calligraphy all over the interior and exterior, which, among other patterns and holy inscriptions in a variety of precious and semi precious stones fixed on the immaculate white marble structure, also has calligraphy on the tomb that identifies and praises Mumtaz Mahal. Another interesting fact is that there are 99 names of Allah found on the sides of the actual tomb as calligraphic inscriptions. After all, Shah Jahan did envision Mumtaz’s home in the paradise, and Taj Mahal was that imagination coming to life.
The Taj Mahal is any obsessive’s dream, with meticulous symmetry across its long and wide diameters. The sole exception to this otherwise uniform aesthetic scheme lies, again, in the gravesite. Taj Mahal was not originally designed to entomb a second person other than Mumtaz Mahal. Aurangzeb, son of Shah Jahan, instead of building a new mausoleum, buried his father next to Mumtaz Mahal. So while Mumtaz Mahal’s casket is located in the exact center of the palace crypt, it is Shah Jahan’s grave - introduced to the mausoleum following his death in 1666 - that rocks its artistic equilibrium with a west-of-center resting place. This is the only part of the entire complex ( including the gardens / mosque ) etc which is not in symmetry.
The Taj Mahal takes on different colouring at different times of the day, from a pinkish hue in the morning, milky white in the evening and golden at night when lit by the moon. They say the changing colour resembles the changing mood of females - in particular the Emperor's queen.
My first view of the monument from so far .. at the first gate. It is often said that hype creates over expectations and that over expectations often kill the joy of our own experiences. But the beauty of the monument left me overwhelmed inspite of my huge expectations. Right from the moment I laid my eyes on it from a distance there was magic that left me stumped.
The makers employed an optical trick in the construction of this monument. As you move closer to the main complex, the Taj keeps getting smaller.It seems to grow bigger as you walk away. The guides here say when you leave,its impact on you is so big ... you take the Taj with you in your heart.
My lesson from the Taj Mahal - Even with all its beauty and depth, true love can seem inappropriate to many. The circumstances bringing two souls together maybe conventionally unromantic or unacceptable. But it can't be ignored. Even as we strive for perfection and acceptance in all our relationships - a pure union can be imperfectly perfect.
And this then brings me to the reason for my visit to the Taj Mahal. I have personally lived through and loved all three stages as theorized by me earlier. I had deemed myself unlucky to find or unworthy to experience the love that I thought I deserved. That was until he crashed in as my third love, the perfect for me love. I had promised myself I would visit the Taj when I found love or vice versa.
Love as I now know calls me or messages me the first thing in the morning
Just to say Good Morning
Just to hear my voice.
Love as I now know asks if I have had my breakfast,
If I have gulped my mandatory 4 glasses of water,
Knows how to make me the perfect cup of black tea that wipes my frowns away
Asks about my Lunch and Dinner too
Knowing very well I have the tendency to skip them more than occasionally.
Love as I now know does not hesitate to hold my hand,
Proudly,
As we walk into a room of people we do not know.
Love as I now know has helped pick up and fix my broken pieces,
Is persistently healing my wounded soul,
And never tires of building up my person.
Love as I now know has convinced me to choose growth
To not be held hostage by the person I was yesterday
last week, last month , last year, 20 years back.
Love as I now know encourages me to make art, pursue my dance,
follow my passions, listen to my heart and bury my fears
Travel alone and see the World through my eyes - my lens
With assurances that his heart will always keep open
the arms that give me the warmest embrace ... My Eternal Home.
Love as I now know listens to everything said and unsaid,
His attention span being longer than the last word that exits my mouth
Love as I now know appreciates the beauty on the surface of the ocean that is me
He doesn't shy away from riding the waves that come along
He dares to dive down to discover treasures that are so deep under
Treasures he believed to be there,
Treasures I didn't know existed.
Love as I now know is open like a clear blue sky.
And understands that most of me
Is in the stars shining through the dark sky that is my past.
Love as I now know loves me in the way I always dreamed of
in the way I had stopped hoping I would ever find,
For the love I had before now found, were on shaky ground
that fell beneath my hopeful feet.
Love as I know now is a heart that shines so bright
that the sun blushes in admiration
And the moon repents having moved to the other side.
Love as I now know has made me come face to face with another phase -
Emotions that hold me back ...Urge me not to move ahead so fast
Fear that recalls childhood wounds, doubts of worthiness,
And threatens to drown the pedestal of self esteem under construction.
Love as I now know makes me predict an uncertain future
Search for probability that I will be alone again
Try and find methods for self preservation in the wake of a storm that
may or may not come
Fear that is building up several layers of self sabotage and confusion
that covers the heart that is beating for him.
Love as I now know still convinces me to choose moving beyond fear.
Love he says is on the other side of fear.
He says he doesn't have all the answers right now, but neither do I
And that he says is perfectly alright
Love as I now know doesn't make sense for its crappy timing
and for being so unlike the picture I had painted in my head.
But he forces me to trust our feelings are valid
And that to understand it,
We have to surrender to it. Accept it.
Love as I now know is the once-in-a-lifetime kind of love
It is dancing wildly around me and tempting me with promises
That I have to believe is fated
Love as I now know still remains just far enough out of reach
But not elusive ... and it is worth the fight.
Love as I now know can be my new beginning,
This moment is important not how things might play out in the future
All along this was where I was being led
Love as I now know has shown me to trust in my destination as much as the journey
Love as I now know tells me there is a reason for everything.
A season for everything.
Love as I now know tells me it is the season to listen to my heart.
A heart that should give up thantophobia.
( This is my entry for week 6 of LJ Idol - where the topic given to us was Fear is the Heart of Love. Concrits as always are welcome as also suggestions for improvement. )
Most of our first love happens when we are very young , too young even. High School Love - the idealistic love that is so very often just what floats into our life from the pages of a fairy tale book.
Most of the time this is the kind of love that appeals to what love should look like and what we should be doing. We enter into it with the belief that this will be our only love and it doesn’t matter if it doesn’t feel quite right, or if we find ourselves having to swallow down our personal truths to make it work because deep down we believe that this is what love is supposed to be.
This type of love is mostly based on curiosity about the opposite gender, need for diversion from the the then real pressures of studies and building up a future, the necessity for an outflow for raging hormones that break out every now and then , the firm belief that no one understands us except for this one person we have found or has found us.
Because in this type of love what matters is not what we feel but what looks right. It's a love that most of us out grow.
Our second love is supposed to be our hard love-the one that teaches us lessons about who we are and how we often want or need to be loved. This is the kind of love that hurts. The kind of love based on who would be acceptable to us, our parents , the society even probably.
So more often we think we are charting a course different from our heart breaking first. But in reality we are still making choices out of the need to learn lessons.Isn't that what life is all about. Our second love can become a cycle, oftentimes one we keep repeating because we think that somehow the ending will be different than the first time. After all we are no longer giggling , awkward , inexperienced youngsters we were back then. And yet, each time we try, it somehow ends worse than before.
This type of love will most likely entail high levels of drama. And this perhaps is exactly what keeps us addicted to this storyline - the emotional rollercoaster of extreme highs and lows and like a junkie trying to get a fix, we stick through the lows with the expectation of the high.
With this kind of love, trying to make it work becomes more important than whether it actually should. It’s the love that we wished was right.
And then our third love is the love we never see coming. The one that usually looks all wrong for us and that destroys any lingering ideals we clung to about what love is supposed to be. This is the love that comes crashing in so easily that it feels almost surreal and impossible. It’s the kind where the connection can’t be explained and knocks us off our feet because we never planned for it.
The soul mate theories would blend in perfectly in this type of love. This is the love where we come together with someone and it just fits-there aren’t any ideal expectations about how each person should be acting, nor is there pressure to become someone other than we are.
This is kind of love that gives us the awesome feeling of simply being accepted for who we are already-and it shakes us to our core.
Maybe we don’t all experience these loves in this lifetime, and perhaps that’s just because we aren’t ready to. Maybe the reality is we need to truly learn what love isn’t before we can grasp what it is.
Of course there are those love stories that didn't have to pass through all these stages. The first time that took their breath away passionately lasted till their last breath.
When we talk of love we have to talk about monuments of love. Atleast I have to because I finally reached that stage where my theories on what love ought to be have been proved in practice. And so I finally made the trip to see the most famous monument for love in the world ... The Taj Mahal at Agra in India.
The Taj Mahal is a dedication of love by the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan to his wife Mumtaz Mahal. The story goes thus - Like many of his predecessors, Shah Jahan married several wives over the course of his adult life. Although Shah Jahan spread his heart around, none of these ladies found quite the same favor as his third wife (but first love), Arjumand Banu Begum, more famously known as Mumtaz Mahal. History says he was so enamoured by her that he killed her first husband in war to take her as his bride. She was his wife , friend , lover and companion. It is said she was by his side at all times. Their union lasted 19 years and led to the birth of 14 children. Complications during the birth of the final child led to Mahal’s untimely passing at the age of 39. Shah Jahan was so stricken by the loss of his longtime companion that he decided to memorialize Mumtaz Mahal with a spectacular tomb. Construction on the Mahal and its surroundings began in 1632, one year after her death, and continued for just over two decades. It was completed in 22 years and involved effort and labour of 20,000 men and 1000 elephants at an astronomical cost even by the standards of those times.
The Taj Mahal being the dedication and homage of Mumtaz Mahal, it has calligraphy all over the interior and exterior, which, among other patterns and holy inscriptions in a variety of precious and semi precious stones fixed on the immaculate white marble structure, also has calligraphy on the tomb that identifies and praises Mumtaz Mahal. Another interesting fact is that there are 99 names of Allah found on the sides of the actual tomb as calligraphic inscriptions. After all, Shah Jahan did envision Mumtaz’s home in the paradise, and Taj Mahal was that imagination coming to life.
The Taj Mahal is any obsessive’s dream, with meticulous symmetry across its long and wide diameters. The sole exception to this otherwise uniform aesthetic scheme lies, again, in the gravesite. Taj Mahal was not originally designed to entomb a second person other than Mumtaz Mahal. Aurangzeb, son of Shah Jahan, instead of building a new mausoleum, buried his father next to Mumtaz Mahal. So while Mumtaz Mahal’s casket is located in the exact center of the palace crypt, it is Shah Jahan’s grave - introduced to the mausoleum following his death in 1666 - that rocks its artistic equilibrium with a west-of-center resting place. This is the only part of the entire complex ( including the gardens / mosque ) etc which is not in symmetry.
The Taj Mahal takes on different colouring at different times of the day, from a pinkish hue in the morning, milky white in the evening and golden at night when lit by the moon. They say the changing colour resembles the changing mood of females - in particular the Emperor's queen.
My first view of the monument from so far .. at the first gate. It is often said that hype creates over expectations and that over expectations often kill the joy of our own experiences. But the beauty of the monument left me overwhelmed inspite of my huge expectations. Right from the moment I laid my eyes on it from a distance there was magic that left me stumped.
The makers employed an optical trick in the construction of this monument. As you move closer to the main complex, the Taj keeps getting smaller.It seems to grow bigger as you walk away. The guides here say when you leave,its impact on you is so big ... you take the Taj with you in your heart.
My lesson from the Taj Mahal - Even with all its beauty and depth, true love can seem inappropriate to many. The circumstances bringing two souls together maybe conventionally unromantic or unacceptable. But it can't be ignored. Even as we strive for perfection and acceptance in all our relationships - a pure union can be imperfectly perfect.
And this then brings me to the reason for my visit to the Taj Mahal. I have personally lived through and loved all three stages as theorized by me earlier. I had deemed myself unlucky to find or unworthy to experience the love that I thought I deserved. That was until he crashed in as my third love, the perfect for me love. I had promised myself I would visit the Taj when I found love or vice versa.
Love as I now know calls me or messages me the first thing in the morning
Just to say Good Morning
Just to hear my voice.
Love as I now know asks if I have had my breakfast,
If I have gulped my mandatory 4 glasses of water,
Knows how to make me the perfect cup of black tea that wipes my frowns away
Asks about my Lunch and Dinner too
Knowing very well I have the tendency to skip them more than occasionally.
Love as I now know does not hesitate to hold my hand,
Proudly,
As we walk into a room of people we do not know.
Love as I now know has helped pick up and fix my broken pieces,
Is persistently healing my wounded soul,
And never tires of building up my person.
Love as I now know has convinced me to choose growth
To not be held hostage by the person I was yesterday
last week, last month , last year, 20 years back.
Love as I now know encourages me to make art, pursue my dance,
follow my passions, listen to my heart and bury my fears
Travel alone and see the World through my eyes - my lens
With assurances that his heart will always keep open
the arms that give me the warmest embrace ... My Eternal Home.
Love as I now know listens to everything said and unsaid,
His attention span being longer than the last word that exits my mouth
Love as I now know appreciates the beauty on the surface of the ocean that is me
He doesn't shy away from riding the waves that come along
He dares to dive down to discover treasures that are so deep under
Treasures he believed to be there,
Treasures I didn't know existed.
Love as I now know is open like a clear blue sky.
And understands that most of me
Is in the stars shining through the dark sky that is my past.
Love as I now know loves me in the way I always dreamed of
in the way I had stopped hoping I would ever find,
For the love I had before now found, were on shaky ground
that fell beneath my hopeful feet.
Love as I know now is a heart that shines so bright
that the sun blushes in admiration
And the moon repents having moved to the other side.
Love as I now know has made me come face to face with another phase -
Emotions that hold me back ...Urge me not to move ahead so fast
Fear that recalls childhood wounds, doubts of worthiness,
And threatens to drown the pedestal of self esteem under construction.
Love as I now know makes me predict an uncertain future
Search for probability that I will be alone again
Try and find methods for self preservation in the wake of a storm that
may or may not come
Fear that is building up several layers of self sabotage and confusion
that covers the heart that is beating for him.
Love as I now know still convinces me to choose moving beyond fear.
Love he says is on the other side of fear.
He says he doesn't have all the answers right now, but neither do I
And that he says is perfectly alright
Love as I now know doesn't make sense for its crappy timing
and for being so unlike the picture I had painted in my head.
But he forces me to trust our feelings are valid
And that to understand it,
We have to surrender to it. Accept it.
Love as I now know is the once-in-a-lifetime kind of love
It is dancing wildly around me and tempting me with promises
That I have to believe is fated
Love as I now know still remains just far enough out of reach
But not elusive ... and it is worth the fight.
Love as I now know can be my new beginning,
This moment is important not how things might play out in the future
All along this was where I was being led
Love as I now know has shown me to trust in my destination as much as the journey
Love as I now know tells me there is a reason for everything.
A season for everything.
Love as I now know tells me it is the season to listen to my heart.
A heart that should give up thantophobia.
( This is my entry for week 6 of LJ Idol - where the topic given to us was Fear is the Heart of Love. Concrits as always are welcome as also suggestions for improvement. )