Friday, May 25, 2012

Text embedded in my digital paintings:


Text embedded in my digital paintings:

For human beings throughout history, love has been considered a mystery, for it is an emotional experience that is both transcen­dent and personal at the same time. Love is perhaps the most familiar yet most unknowable of our emotions. It can transport us beyond our ego and fill us with bliss and compassion, but it can also be a crucible of rawness, pain, and illusion.

Particularly in an intimate relationship be it romantic or everyday love's power can magically expand our humanity. At its very best, passion is spacious, open, compassionate, and even joyful. Yet how ironic that, as imperfect human beings, we yearn for "per­fect love," for it will always elude us—the experience of love, whether painful or joyful, is always perfectly imperfect; this is love's paradox

 "If you can­not fall in love, you cannot get enlightened." For it is this state of leaping into the chaos of love—of being open, uncertain, and vulnerable---that becomes a stepping-stone to our highest self. When we truly love another person, we "lose ourselves," or our self is somehow transcended—even in a moment of wild carnal desire, some tenderness for our beloved arises and it cracks our heart open and changes us forever.

If we can remember the fragility of love and see our beloved through the lens of impermanence, appreciation naturally arises; in Japanese this is known as mono no aware, the beauty of the transitory, be it a flower or love itself. As with all of life, within the seed of love is the seed of sorrow and death, which heightens its poignancy. Through loving one other person with this "bro­ken heart," we have the rare opportunity to learn to focus less on our self and more on others—and that is the beginning of "true" love.

(Based on my research into the poetry of Love)

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