John Keats Tag

November 12, 2012 In Astrology, Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Cause I Love You

We talk glibly of Love as if it can be bought like a bag of pastel-coloured macaroons. Or conjured up by a psychic who says, deftly spreading a well worn deck of cards: “now let’s look at the love-life!”

We talk flippantly of Love as if Love can be compartmentalised into a neat life all of its own. As if Love is a play-thing, to put aside when we tire of it, or it becomes too big and boisterous for our small stingy lives. Each one of us yearns (whether we will admit it or not) to be loved and cherished. To have someone to love and cherish in return. Yet still we lazily window-shop for Love on dating sites. Foolishly mistake Love for Sex. Are not truly brave enough to do the inner work to weed our garden so that a small seed of Love may grow tall in the sunlight.

Many of us live our lives vicariously through the lives of other heroes or heroines. We balk at provocative choices. Terrified we may expose our soft-bellied vulnerability, we manacle ourselves with the cold steel fear of rejection, memories of past betrayals, disappointments. We play it safe, never daring to throw the dice lest we score too high for comfort. Then one new day, we awake to find our fervent prayers have been answered by a benevolent god! How we tremble and shake in unspeakable terror as we stand on the precipice; afraid to take that giant leap, to tumble weightlessly into Love. Afraid to do what it takes to be with the one we cannot be without. Love, like old age, and death, is not for the squeamish. To fall into Love requires valour. To stay in Love demands tenacity.

Science makes an attempt to measure the power of Love by assigning our light-headed omnipotence and euphoria to dopamine and oxytocin. Mood-altering chemicals that flood our brains and make us feel ecstatic. Our right (emotional intuitive) brain lights up like a Christmas tree, and our left (logical language) brain is all shook up, without words to adequately describe … well, nothing really matters any more, except the urgent desire to be with the one we love forever and ever … Astrology describes the synastry, the poetry of the composite chart of a relationship, yet not our warm arousal from a long slumber and our pulse that beats with ardour, urgent passion. We can measure the how. But why we fall we fall in love, why we swoon in the languor of our eroticism, why we bow our heads to our heart’s holiness, why we enter the hallowed portals with blouse unbuttoned, tossing our hair in the face of our morbid fears, remains a Mystery. “Nothing is Mysterious. No human relation. Except Love,” Susan Sontag wrote.

Love is the song of our soul, our connection with our own Divinity. We must take in Love through all six of our senses; imbibe it through all our orifices. Experience it, fully, bravely, with all our human hearts.

“Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced,” wrote John Keats who lived his life brightly, like a tremulous dew-drop, and died at twenty-five, having all too briefly experienced the intensely real burn of passion. Love is the substance of Life. And death. “We must love one another or die,” Auden wrote. And cantankerous Philip Larkin affirmed in his famous ode to immortality, “What will survive of us is love”.

There comes a time when we simply cannot go on rummaging through the closets of our childhood looking for reasons for why things happen as they do. We cannot go back to the postage stamps of our past fumbled attempts at Love. We must dredge up our strength, our courage, to stop punishing ourselves, each other. Risk using our imagination to see the perfection within one another. Bravely continue our pilgrimage, with blisters and bleeding feet, ravished by our own longing. Tenderly follow the scarlet blaze of our own life essence that carries like sweet perfume and mingles with the still night air.

We have just one choice: To allow our hearts to rule, and the warmth of our lover’s perfect body to caress us back to life again.

When my heart came to rule
in the world of love,
it was freed
from both belief
and from disbelief.

On this journey,
I found the problem
to be myself.

When I went beyond myself,
the pathway finally opened.

Mahsati Ganjavi (12th Century)

Art by Irina Vitalievna

James Blunt – Cause I love you.

April 20, 2012 In Relationship, Self Growth By Ingrid Hoffman

Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream)

We encounter them in our offices. They live amongst our families. We befriend them online, in our friendship circles. They are the beguiling strangers we meet on our travels. Men and women who leave us depleted, disorientated, disempowered, sucked dry.

They travel in groups. Wan-faced teens with vacant eyes. Pale bodies indelibly stained with tattoos, savagely pierced with shiny metal – fag ends of ancient initiation ceremonies that once embraced and bound neophytes to the tribe. This fragment of tribal belonging so often lacks a spiritual profundity. So they live their lives vicariously, vacuously. Umbilically attached to the iPod.

The vampire is a shadowy figure that has sunk its sharp fangs into myth and legend in every culture for thousands of years. Cursed, defiled, denied, damned, the un-dead reappear in popular culture, often eroticised: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Interview with the Vampire, Bram Stoker’s Dracula,True Blood,The Vampire Diaries, Twilight. In modern culture, the vampire is mild mannered, courteous. No ghoul or hideous monster. The scene is always the same. A naive, but always willing victim invites the vampire into the home or bedroom, where it sucks the red life blood from a proffered neck to sustain its own life force. There is a chilling sense of fatal attraction. A passive complicity, an enchantment, as the victim exposes her seductive neck, or lies alluringly asleep. Night after night the Vampire visits. The Victim wavers, weakens. Then, bloodless, transforms into a cadaverous demon ravenous for a fresh source of life-blood. Vampires have lost a connection to their core aliveness. Circumstance, or Fate, has battered their ability to connect with Source, the Divine, leaving them lost, alone, going through the motions of living. In movies, TV series, the old myths are coloured with swooning eroticism. The early recorded stories were very dark and carnal, with brutal destruction of the vampire-turned-victim by the ordinary village folk. In myth and fairy tale the hero or heroine is enchanted. Lost in a dark wood, displaced, far from kith and kin, vulnerable. In poetry, love stories, the unconscious psychic connection between lovers becomes the macabre death-dance of victim and persecutor, as lovers merge, fragile psyches become possessed by these devouring archetypes. John Keats describes this sense of enchantment:
Oh what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
And no birds sing… La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

Celebrities captivate sycophants into their orbits. Movie stars, singers, models can be literally possessed by the vampire archetype. They feed off their advisors and groupies, the “love” from their audiences, and in turn are devoured, leaving in their wake the detritus of drugs, drink and deception that destroys. Often suicide is the only way to leave the emptiness. We can constellate the vampire archetype in our own lives in the victim- persecutor dance brutally played out in so many relationships. In fear and lack, we may constellate people into our lives who polish our egos, make us feel needed, loved, important for a while… and together we germinate a symbiotic relationship that leaches our joie de vivre, saps our sense of self, sucks out promise, all hope. “Loneliness, physical or spiritual, may allow this complex to manifest. Falling in love is another common way to become vulnerable to this manifestation. Many vampire stories tell of women or men who unwittingly fall in love with a vampire, and after marriage become their victims” writes Bob Johnson.

Studies on incest and paedophilia tap into the vampire archetype. The vampire complex lurks like a hidden virus in families, surfacing again and again in successive generations. Until someone breaks the ties that bind…

Bob Johnson continues, “Vampire lore suggests incest because the most startling aspect of the folkloric vampire is that he must first attack members of his own family. His victims are preordained to be those he loved most in life. Modern versions do not always include this element, but it is almost universal in vampire folktales. And so we have the vampire father and mother who must first attack those they love.” James Twitchell, in his book on incest writes about the vampire: “I cannot think of any other monster-molester in our culture who does such terrible things to young victims in such a gentlemanly manner. He is always polite and deferential, and his victim is almost always passive in return.” The deeply disturbing movie, Trust deals with online sexual predators and the shattering of trust in a family as a 14-year-old girl is groomed and lured by the vampiric Charlie.

Not all victims of vampires become vampires in turn. Some survive to write books, appear on talk shows. Young children escape the savage breast of a vampire mothers or a psychically devouring father. Elizabeth Lesser escaped her demon lover and wrote about her experiences in Broken Open. We are not required to become vampires. We allow ourselves to swoon. We stay too long. We deny our instincts. We vacillate, procrastinate, assuage our doubts, wish and hope it will all get better…. It never does. Without a strong sense of authentic self, a spiritual fountainhead that sustains our thirst, a sense of meaning, a philosophy that animates us when events in our lives darken all the silver linings in the clouds, we float in a void, drained of our life force, or sit, waiting at the window. Passively, we vacillate, procrastinate, and loiter in the darkness of our own fear, our own terror of living our lives with blood red passion…

So our holy quest is to discover for ourselves that source of spiritual succour. To connect with our inner world through music, dance, poetry. To discover an activity that gives meaning to our lives. To draw into our lives those relationships that nourish and delight. It takes courage to dismount from the Ferris Wheel of busyness and distraction. Often it is an act of will to sit in a field of daisies, and listen to the whisper of our soul, the heartbeat of the earth. Like Parsifal, we need to ask the right question. And then take action to save ourselves.

Stevie Nick’s lyrics depict the vampiric dance

“Now and others say…. she’s not really real….Like a candle burns bright, wants to burn faster~ well maybe then… at least she really feels.. Burning like a candle in the middle…She’s lonely, lost…she’s disconnected. She finds no comfort in her surroundings. Beautiful, Insecure, she has nothing. She moves from situation to situation…. like a ghost. Then she sees him ….candle burning….”