This poem got me to thinking about loves encountered across vast timelines of existence. Things become complicated to figure out if one can't deny more than one lifetime and have to consider that the relationships that we are cultivating just might stretch across many previous life experiences. I suspect that we are living the last gasps of romantic love as our consciousness expands with our hearts enabling us to embrace many different kinds of loving, with all love being exciting, moving and transformative. I don't know that it is actually that hard to accept, except when there is only one rule book of love, written in one language and applying to only one conformity with the vast majority of players being good with the way the status quo is going. What is different is going to be suspect.
Mine is a country somewhat obsessed with youth and vigor and sex. It is like my entire culture is fixated on the money shot of a story and it can't turn away and move on to the next scene of the movie. Sex is not the center of all loving. Attraction is an important part of the story to be sure but it is not the whole story by any means. One doesn't want to skip any of these exciting stages of life nor does one want to overstay their welcome. Hafiz seems to suggest to me that the same enthusiasm and curiosity that young lovers have can expand to involve all aspects of those experiences plus the vast scope of experience that age brings forward in exploration and adventure. Passion achieves a latitude and longitude - time and space - or room in aging that young passion cannot abide. Maturity allows a cultivation of experience to live fully in new and inspiring ways. This suggests being available for counsel and encouragement and standing firmly in the center of a worldly life with knowledge to share. There is great joy in this. Aging in this modern world asks us to make choices about things now and these choices require we let the delights of the past go so we can embrace what awaits us of deep and abiding satisfaction in our closing round.
This is a time of magnificent change in civilization and if we are lucky enough to remember it, life continues with us not against us. It only goes against us when we won't let go of what we know and we refuse to imagine that what awaits us will be better than what we had.
Thank you for listening.
https://pixabay.com/music/world-desert-voices-11468/
Music: Apocalypse by Cigarettes After Sex reminds me of the melancholy sound of things expected, falling apart beyond our control. I love the brooding nature of the song and as I looked up the video I was thrilled to see the song's underlying scenes from one of my favorite of all time movies, Lost In Translation. This film, as explained in Wikipedia:
"...The academic Nicholas Y.B. Wong contends that the film's lack of "heart-melting connections and melodramatic (re)unions between characters" represents a postmodern portrait of love, writing that Lost in Translation is "about non-love, the predominance of affairs and the complexities of intimacy. Characters vacillate between falling in love and out of love. They are neither committed to someone nor emotionally unattached." [Sophia] Coppola said Bob and Charlotte's relationship is "supposed to be romantic but on the edge.... [A] little bit more than friends but not an actual romance.... To me, it's pretty un-sexual between them—innocent and romantic, and a friendship..."
Yes, a post-modern portrait of love. This song and film touches beautifully upon what I am writing about here. We can have deep and profound relationships with people that completely change our world for the better and they may touch upon romance but they reside and thrive outside the boundaries of what is established as "romantic". I'm of the opinion we need to protect, value and hold space for these different ways of loving.
See this movie if you haven't. It is quite moving.
The original post in this series of poems by Hafiz (including an addendum regarding the authenticity of these poems) can be found here. Also, my thoughts on this series a year into these poems, HERE.
The Gift: Poems by Hafiz and translated by Daniel Ladinsky can be purchased here.