See ya on the way down!

Merry Meet, once again, Family, Friends, Followers and Lurkers!

So, what do you think about love? Such a lovely and terrifying emotion, isn't it? I view it as the the ultimate paradox. Love can either empower us, or pierce our hearts with such force as to make the strongest of us crumble to our knees beneath it's weight. I truly don't believe there is another more complex or schizophrenic emotion. And while most of us are able to exercise a reasonable degree of common sense under normal circumstances, when we are in love, we are completely and utterly at the mercy of our hearts. As beautiful as an emotion as it may be, we lie, cheat, steal, and kill all in it's name. We lose our sense of judgement, self-respect and at times, our minds. Ah yes..love is grand!

Think about it. Almost every song you hear is either about looking for love, falling in love, falling out of love, losing someone you love, reuniting with someone you love or hating someone you love!!

So, what is it about love that causes us to throw caution to the wind and act completely out of character? I mean, if we began behaving this way independent of a love affair, we might be considered good candidates for psychotherapy.

I believe that "love is blind" may be truest words ever spoken and if you've ever been in love, you know it's true. No matter how many red flags go up in a relationship, at times, the only thing we hear is the th-thump, th-thump, th-thump of Love's beating heart. We see someone that in our mind's eye is perfection incarnate and who possess none of the faults and frailties that we humans are famous for. We put that person high atop a pedestal, often bestowing upon them the infallible characteristics that are attributed only to the Gods. The danger is, that the higher up on the pedestal you place someone, the farther they have to fall.

What I find mind-boggling is that we never seem to hold ourselves in the same regard. We rarely love ourselves in the same unconditional, all consuming manner. And if we did, we would probably be considered narcissists! It's like the old song says, "you're nobody unless somebody loves you". Well, that's bullshit, but if it were true, that "somebody" should at least begin with YOU!

All this pondering made me recall a time, way back in the day, when I had fallen in love. I was in deep smit! The sun and moon rose around this person and despite all the intuitive warnings, I too placed him high atop a pedestal. His attention, or lack thereof, colored my every emotion. Yet, all the subtle nuances of his personality that I should have recognized as an impending disaster, I chose to blissfully ignore.

Well, the day finally came when I had to face the undeniable truth, that yes, he was in fact, an asshole! And when the pedestal I had placed him on finally toppled, as often they do, it was with a "thud" that could be heard around the World. Yes, those aftershocks you felt came from right here in New Jersey! Ok, well, that's a lie but it definitely registered a magnitude 8.0 on my little "Richter Scale O' Happiness".

When the dust eventually settled and my head had cleared enough for me to survey the carnage, something unexpected happened, I was actually...relieved! It's emotionally exhausting trying to reconcile the truth, with what you would rather believe. But, there was something else, I began to reconnect with someone I hadn't thought of in a really, really long time...Me!

Oh, it didn't happen overnight. At times it seems like forever before our hearts wrap around what our mind already knows. I mourned the loss of the person I believed in, I mourned the story with the "happily ever after" ending I told myself, I wondered if I had always been this friggin' naive or was it a trait I acquired over time. What I didn't miss however, was the person I became when I believed that someone else deserved that place on the pedestal more than I did.

And all for one beautiful, terrifying and complex emotion. Love.


In Darkness, Light!




Tracy