What specifically is love?

I wrote: I must ask you to be more detailed about love, more specific. What is love? Exactly? Well, that's impossible, but the sense of love, feeling love has so many different forms and tones, I wonder if we can find metaphors to express what this quality of love is that we value so highly?

MB and Ken have begun to respond, though I hope to hear more!

As the day goes on, I will add more to this post. For now, I would say love is:

That sacred place of the heart where you care for another's happiness and well being with a sense of permanence. Love is the deep caring, no matter what the outcome, because there is a serious intent beneath the surfaces that is trustworthy, reliable, strong, withstanding. Love is letting someone love you. It is easy with our children, this deep committment to love through all the joys and all the trials. I would put the strength of the mother-child bond at the heart of what I understand about love, because it is resilient, never-ending, deep, caring, strong, rather than the model of romantic love; in other words, the deepest love for me is familial, and romantic love is most pure and strong when it approaches the lifelong trust and comfort of the familial.

12:03pm. Ah, now, no, that doesn't work either. See Adriana Bliss's post on the mother as couch.

Not to throw out lovemaking with the baby and the bathwater! Romantic love, with its roots in courtly love, the adoration of the beloved from afar, is based all too often on illusions. What I mean, I think, is if romantic love could have the depth and continuity of familial love then it would be invincible. When I see this with couples who are as in love with each other 20 or 30 years on, that's what I think the miracle is. There's no separation of the muse from your partner. Romantic and familial love converge and nourish each other in spectacular ways.

The madwoman in the attic looking for inspiration...

Where oh where has inspiration gone? Blogging was easy the first year, lately it's been like, umm, like not being able to find your pantyhose in the morning when you have to get to work in an office you've never been in before; realizing there isn't enough coffee cream for the 2 thermos mugs you need every morning, and milk is so weak; being driven crazy by the Wal-mart clock on the wall that ticks worse than Cap'n Hook's crook because time is passing and nothing is emerging; seeing all the bright diamond glistenings in the snow when you take your dog out for a romp and knowing it's all been blogged and so have whatever photos you can think of taking; a dull kind of February silence filling the well that's frozen...

What am I thinking about? Men, confusing beautiful creatures that they are, but that's a constant, so never mind.

I wonder about evolutionary theory and the development of ethics. This topic's come at me from 3 different sources in the past few days. Something about how do you explain the development of ethic in 'natural selection.' Probably it's similar to wondering how 'mind' emerges from 'brain,' though I don't know. It's fascinating and perhaps I'll be able to work it into a prose poetry piece soon.

I wonder about the ballyhoo at the Museum of New Painting with a face-off on Saturday between the curator of the Art Gallery of Ontario, a couple of well known professors, and international artists over the "new new art." Or what I imagine is a faceoff between new media artists and old media artists, but we'll see...

I wonder about my birthday next week and why I'm here and what life means and what the future will bring, you know the score.

But mostly I wonder where inspiration is.

A late Winter's path...

A quiet weekend. My daughter at her father's, the exhaustion of single parenting sets in. Yesterday I napped on and off all day, and was too tired to go dancing at 10pm, even though I was showered and dressed and ready to go, so I spent an hour meditating with 'loving-kindness' instead and fell asleep. It's February, classically my most difficult month. Seasonal Affective Disorder. I've tried staring into full spectrum light bulbs in other years for an hour or two a day, clipping it to my computer monitor, making sure to let the light into the retina, with perhaps a minor sense of a lift the next day but nothing substantial. I slump. It has turned cold, wind chill of -17C, with a northerly wind, and I know I'm not going to make it to the lifedrawing session I thought I might attend tonight. What I will do is take my dog out to Christie Pits where she can run up and down large enough hills and buy just enough food for tomorrow at a local Italian grocery store and return home. Probably I shall do my monthly two and a half hour meditation this evening, the one I always do when my daughter goes to her Dad's on the one weekend a month he allows. It's a cleansing, a rest, a time to recoop, a time to prepare for whatever's coming. I can no more avoid the '1/10th of the day' meditation than I can the feeling of exhaustion after she leaves. Her return is always celebratory, usually she returns late, when, after a weekend of rest and extended meditation, I am renewed. While I had some lovely conversations with friends by phone, all plans for activity this weekend went by the wayside: sometimes rest is best...

Favoured quotes

Not usually liking quotes out of context, prefering either the original author's or the poster's comments for embedding the jewel in, I, too, have my favourites. These speak to me about art, ways of being, meaning...


"I stopped and let myself lean a moment against the blue shoulder of the air. The work of my art is the work of the world's heart. There is no other art."

Alison Luterman


"You are not here to love the world; you are here to be love in the world."

Grace Johnson

A woman who is always there, somewhere.

Update:edit. Thank you, Richard,and MB, for your invaluable feedback. I've made some small changes, & will let it rest a bit and come back to it in a few weeks. The drawing I did in the mid-90s at my long gone cottage on Georgina Island. She's not the woman in this small word sketch, but somehow a similar energy...

In his "wish stream" a woman like her doesn't exit. She is beyond the years of possibility. She is slipped into, and relaxed in, like a well-worn dressing gown, a comfortable old couch, a favourite cafe in which to ponder one's thoughts. She is the warmth of a female oasis where struggle isn't necessary. She is the mother's arms, the place of acceptance, the restful time of sunset. She is the quietening. She is not just over the hill, but down in the valley on the other side, laughing and dancing her opulences. There is no need to impress her, or even to pursue her. She is a feature of the unchanging land. The aging woman with unbounded compassion towards herself and him. She is a prophecy of what he can become. Now she lies like sheer vintage lace over his vision. A bit obscuring, a reaction to the fickleness of his youthful women, an attempt at having a fixture of permanence to rebound back to. But it isn't what he wants, what he dreams of, what quickens his body, opens his heart. The 'wish stream' of images, visions, idealizations of love that he yearns for in his dreamy harem of beautiful women only includes a house mother who services others. Her yellowing teeth, her aging skin and its wrinkles not for the ardour of sweet romance. He found his way into her realm to heal a tired and wounded heart, the slings and outrageous arrows of lost love, and now he must make his way out and away from her, glistening again like a new-born baby.

Between One & the Other

There is a moment where you're not paying attention when you melt into. Before that, self conscious effort. If the ego is how we see ourselves, we forget who we are. In the forgetting we open. Looking back, we can't say when or how it happened. Only one moment we were skin sliding on skin and in the next culminating towards orgasm; we were moving our bodies with awkward rhythm and then we were dancing without care, liquid motion, instruments of the music; we were struggling with disassembled words that wanted to flow with great pasison but couldn't and the next we were writing our opus. It's the moment of melting, where we've disappeared from ourselves, that I'm intrigued with.

Hydra-head of Essentialism in Neuroscience

Essentialism: women’s essence is maternal; to be fulfilled, a woman must be a mother and spend her life mothering. Which not only is ludicrous but dangerous to the life, liberty and freedom of all women to live their lives fully in any way they choose and to develop their talents, intelligence, capacities in any and every area of human endeavour, not just the one of raising children.

This is not to deny the importance of having and raising children! Nothing could be more important for us as a species. But that one half of the human race should be limited to this role is essentialistic. As if it is her unchanging, eternal role…

That thought system has not only been challenged but overthrown in the Western world, surely. After half a century of feminism aren't we are well past it? Does it keep cropping up in various forms because to have clearly defined roles for people makes the workings of a society easier?

The latest incarnation is in the field of neuroscience. Did you know that “from pregnancy on, female mammals are brighter, bolder and better able to cope with life than their childless counterparts”? That “[t]hese brain improvements are permanent, lasting from childbearing years into senescence”? Basically it all seems to boil down to some hormones that increase the ability to bond and the capacity to love: cortisol (which is usually associated with depression but which appears in elevated levels during the first week post-partum and appears to be involved in initial mother-child bonding), the endorphins, oxytocin and vasopressin, or “love hormones.” And increased neuronal pathways in the hippocampus, the hypothalamus (a region claimed to "strongly" affect "maternal behaviour"), the amygdala (which is claimed to regulate "maternal love"). Much of the evidence for the necessity of maternalizing the woman because it makes her smarter is based on the fact that women can distinguish their own baby’s cry out of a multitude, or their own baby’s smell in blind smell tests. Oh, and mommy rats could do mazes faster than non-mommy rats. It’s all a dubious application of fascinating scientific research and leaves me palpitating with worry. Maternal neurotransmitters just sounds like jargon for yet another hydra-head of essentialism.

The deeper message of this research, it seems to me, is that falling in love itself increases intelligence, curiosity, daring, and the beautiful nurturing behaviour that follows naturally surely sends those “love hormones” skyrocketing.

If you can lay down the inherent essentialism of the article, the research is utterly fascinating.
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Article in question, and from which I quoted: Giving Birth to Supermom, by William Illsay Atkinson.

technorati tags: essentialism, essentialism in neuroscience, maternal hormones, Craig Kinsley, Kelly Lambert, Alison Fleming .