The Secret Door

Love in Rehabilitation Series : II

‘ The King was baffled and offered the hand of his daughter in marriage to any prince who can find out where his daughter goes to at night.’ So says a line in a popular fairy tale. The translation today might mean that the King was seeking a person who understands what love is.

 

At a teen stage I thought I knew. It comes in brief moments, engaging a quality of feel that we don't customarily assign a name to. It comes in response to an inquiry that we may have about the future. ' What will I be when I grow up? ' With no other way to raise a response, of an experience that may be in another dimension, the human faculties reach into a secret door and bring a suggestion of light that shines on the eyes, the mind and that which raised the query.

 

It settles the agitation and we are left to wonder about its assurance, the creative power, God or love. We grow in familiarity with this sensation and preserve it in a private part of ourselves. Then we meet someone with whom that door to our privacy swings open and begins to share our deep secret with that person.

 

Did we know that person before? Are we a kindred spirit? What nature of mystery brought us together? It’s possible that after a relationship over some years we grow apart and may engage in a separation. And then the inquiries are different. We have the advantage of hindsight and now more than ever we are given the opportunity to understand that old feeling which we grew up as a teen.

 

Such an opportunity for someone who believes in love is indeed rare but not for vengeful ones. Only when we offer ourselves in peace do we come to understand the workings of love. It’s a door to the world, of an eternal lover that we spend every life with, a barrel partner, our hopes for the future and the way we as a specie seek the perfection of life in love as in the knowledge of life.

 

In peace from our stormy rages we approach it with a burning wood in hand like a hermit, or the regained innocence of a child, a lover who is in profound regret, sometimes the simple admission that we don't know or the burning crucible of wanting to know. In whichever way we enter into covenant with it, that's the way it accepts our invitation. And thereafter begins the first day of the rest of our lives.