Love…Love in the city.. Is it possible?

Lately I had more than one conversation on a subject of love. I feel blessed with all women in my life, wise, beautiful, highly bright and interesting.  However, subject of love is haunting me as the conversations leading toward pathways across the lands of hope, desperation, optimism, pessimism etc. Ultimately all come down to the one question: Is it ever possible to find someone who I would want to share my life with?

There is no doubt, that love came as a lesson for many by the time they reached late twenties, broken hearts, promises, dreams… on the other hand learning about denial and many other sides of self;  its hard to imagine that  they were there on the first place, from very beginning, prior love experiences. Love…. what is love? How to define it? How to feel it? Is it different for everyone or there is one or perhaps several universal notions that makes sense to all of us despite the gender and age. In the culture of my origin, I have learned my first lesson of love through russian novels, through “the longing for the feeling that set everything right”. One the other hand I felt loved in my family: being fed, given clothes and shelter, given opportunity to study. At that time, novels seemed a strange guide to the emotional outlet that I was just getting started to understand. In “Idiot”, one of the main characters has naive notion of love toward a young women Anastassiya, blinded with shadows of her own and her male friend existence. The main character is convinced that the love that he has for people can heal their wounds and open people eyes to see the world differently. Well, the novel does not necessary ends with a happy ending… Main character loses his mind, the Anastassiya is murdered, people did not changed and did not see the world through the main character’s eyes; therefore, pure love failed. Well, this is the conclusion I drew when I was a teens, it might partially explains my rebellious and raging attitudes. I was battling with the concept of love and continue to do so… I remember when I was a child, my mother was trying to protect me from what she called “a life mistake” partially copying with her own unhappiness and desperation with the poverty and inconsistent effort of my father to filled in her unrealistic expectations. So the lesson was: Don’t fall in love, if you do your life will be over. I am still puzzled how much childhood experiences influenced me in my adulthood. Yes, it is possible and now I know it, to loose yourself in the feeling of love: creativity usually is the best and most outstanding documentations of such feeling: poems, music, novels, paintings, drawings, finding the best way to say what you feel – it is the best gift of all when the love begins.. I remember myself going through the lines in my head, thinking what could be the smartest and the funniest thing to say to a person I dear the most… The energy, the flow, the life that was in me was so big and so powerful…

I learned that going through transitions is a part of the love experience.  Feeling the flow of love is like swimming through the river of life and death.  Clarissa Pinkola Estes comes across the subject of love through the journey of discovering it as a part of self, knowledge and spirituality. In her book she speaks about love as a source of transformation of ones self through various stages in life; the cycles of life and death (as being in the world of illusion and letting them go, gaining true perspectives); being in search for love and going over the struggles; being tested and scared for life, wounded and transformed by them; becoming wiser as a result. So yes, love… it is possible when love becomes a quest for life, when it is a journey and not a destination, when it is a daily devotion as a way of living, when it is a daily battle at times and a struggle. Sometimes I feel lost in my hope that love is possible but than again: I see it all around me and I feel it everywhere I go. It might not be the love that is “sold as an only correct idea by hollywood” but it is love. So, I am choosing to believe that love is possible, that love exists in the city in different places and among different people… It is exists in me… All I need to do is be willing to accept it with gratitude.