On Love: The Spiritual Component....August 15, 1999
When two people are in love, it is often that they share similar spiritual beliefs. While perhaps not essential, having similar dogmas certainly lends assistance to the maintenance of domestic harmony. When operating from a place of similar belief, it is easier to understand where the other person is coming from without a great deal of communication. Some would go so far as to say that it also facilitates parental consistency. Nevertheless, I feel it is completely possible to separate discipline, morality, humanity, and respect from spirituality. Indeed, I have made mention before of my thoughts on teaching children a diverse variety of tenets, including one's own, and allowing the child to make up his own mind at his leisure. Parents with dissimilar beliefs, therefore, may even be more well equipped to educate their child about the world's various dogmas.
But I digress. It is not individual spiritual beliefs as they relate to love that is the focus of this entry; it is the component of love where the partners' souls communicate with each other consciously and unconsciously, whether near or far apart. Akin to that of twins, this kind of communication clearly indicates that the relationship of the individuals transcends mere friendship, existing at a far deeper and profusely intimate level. It is a beauty of love that simply cannot be appreciated by anyone outside the relationship, nor can it be understood by anyone who has never experienced true, to the core of the soul, love for another.
While not quite as simple as completing each other's sentences, this is an initial, more mundane process related to the one I am referring to. More complex communication comes in the form of similar dreams at the same time, picking up the phone to call each other at the same time, or experiences that the lovers have in physical isolation that they later discover are relative in timeframe and reference.
The Goddess and I have had many such experiences. They serve to validate and strengthen our connection and love for each other exponentially with each occurrence. Two more vivid and spiritually significant happened just in the last couple months.
Late in the spring of this year, I was taking a hike in my revered park with Reekie and a client. There was a freshness in the early afternoon air that signified the laboured, dying breaths of winter. The trees, awakened from deep slumber by a few days of milder weather, were sprouting promising buds of lush foliage and cooling canopies. On the damp, partly soggy and partially frozen trails, melt water trickled downhill in the various cracks and crevasses. There was a hum of activity in the air as returning birds reminded us of their song and critters yawned and stretched their legs through the forest without fear of sinking into deep snow.
About halfway up the hill on one of the less groomed trails, I happened upon a feather resting on the ground.
It was a Raven feather.
I realize the spiritual significance of Ravens in many cultures, but as there are an abundance of Ravens in the area, I usually do not pay attention to their discarded feathers. Nevertheless, on this day, I stopped in my tracks, not minding that my client was wandering ever further ahead, and that Reekie was whining for me to get a move on.
I first just stood there examining the feather as it was motionless on the ground. Picking it up delicately, I wondered to myself what was compelling me to attend to the feather with such compulsion. I brushed my fingers along it, feeling the feather's light softness, revelling in it's power for the bird. In closing my eyes, I could picture the jet black beast soaring in the sky, cawing harshly, looking for fresh kill, yet there was something pleasing and attractive in the image. Perhaps, I thought, it was the mere beauty in life itself, a sensuousness exacerbated with by the renewing, regenerating cycle of spring.
Needless to say, I kept the feather, and still have it to this day. I found out that evening in talking to The Goddess that during that afternoon, she had spent time contemplating the literary and spiritual significances of Ravens throughout history....
....Blessed Be
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