Writing a (new) love story
Hi friends! I hope this newsletter finds you well. I wanted to share something with you. I am (slowly, but surely) working on the writing of my second love story. It is currently at the idea stage, but the words are coming through when they can.
After writing my first love story—An Uncommon Bond—it was hard to imagine writing another. It was difficult to imagine because I felt like I had said everything I had to say about love in Bond. But then I changed and my perspective changed, and new ideas began to emerge. This as yet unnamed book feels like the just right creation to follow my last two books, largely because they perfectly reflected the processes of change that brought me to a new understanding. Where before I was somewhat dogmatic with respect to my views on individual and relational transformation (and spirituality!), I have now become more malleable, and compassionate towards the human struggle. And the way that I understand love reflects that.
As part of that transition, I’d like to drop in now and then and share my creative process with you. And, in this particular moment, the core idea that I am working with for this book. I have to be a little bit careful about over-sharing—too much of that can obstruct the creative process—but I do want to share some of it.
In Bond, I was really smitten with the idea that there are profound soul connections that have a kind of life of their own. They are immediately potent and powerful, and usually come crashing down to earth when the reality of each person’s unresolved issues emerge. And then, they have a choice to make—part from each other, or do the work to heal. In Bond, they did both—parting and working on themselves independent of each other—before re-connecting at a more grounded, conscious stage of awareness. It had a bit of a Hollywood ending, and there was a way in which it didn’t feel entirely realistic, even though each person had done real work to heal and transform.
Simply put, there was a way in which the couple remained lodged in a version of love that was steeped in their romantic love conditioning. Not to say that love can’t sustain its romantic properties, but I am leaning towards a broader understanding, one that is more attuned to the whole person. In the Fairy Tale version of love, there is a way in which the two people never really SEE one another in their full human form. They see that which perpetuates the intensities (ecstasy and agony), but they don’t truly attune to the human before them. They see what they want (and need) to see, and do everything they can to exclude the rest.
In this new book, I am more interested in where love comes from, than love itself. I am more interested in the subtleties of interpersonal behaviour, as the springboard to love. In particular, I am wanting to focus on the seemingly small efforts that each person makes to do it all a little bit better. In the Fairy Tale version, everyone is (allegedly) perfect. There is nothing to improve upon. In this version, nobody is perfect. We recognize that we are all carrying an enormity of ancestral trauma, unresolved wounds and issues, unhealthy patterns of relating. We recognize that we are all part of a vaster sociological context that limits, shapes and informs our relatedness. And that the small steps that each person takes to do it a little bit better—particularly when those steps emanate from their love for the other—are HUGELY significant and worthy of our love. In other words, our love for the other comes (partly, if not largely) from seeing them in their totality—their lineage, their conditioning, their struggle to grow—and LOVING them for every effort made to grow forward and LOVE a little bit better. That’s not to say that there can’t be a soulful, romantic quality to the connection—its just to say that our deepest experience of love comes from our connection to each other in reality. We don’t see the challenges of life together as something in the way of love—we see them as the foundation for it. And we recognize that every step we take to improve upon the old ways of being, are pioneering a new way of being for all of us.
At this stage, my understanding of this is at a primitive stage. My hope is that I can develop a more coherent understanding of what I am meaning in the writing of the book. I’m open to hearing any of your thoughts if you feel inspired to share them.
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