love without limits

love is not possession. there is a crisis on the planet, we have forgotten how to commune with a natural way, to flow with the inevitable current of life. we have devised all manner of manipulating and controlling our environment and each other in order to avoid the utter uncertainty of life. insulation, tempered glass, life insurance, and yes, wedding rings protect us from everything and yet nature still has her way. marriage, for all its cozy security, in the end seems to be yet another way that human beings try to harness the wild unpredictability of energy. all the great sages, including jesus, have marveled at the foolishness of looking into the future when today has enough cares of its own. we cannot map the course of our lives onto a marriage certificate and sign on the dotted line in declaration of a never-ending contract with another human being. there are far too many variables for that. a most frightening aspect of the human condition is the likelihood of trying to influence and control another human spirit. the person we are on the day of marriage is not the person we become after 3 or 15 or 40 years. why the grave disappointment and anger that arises when our partners follow the only consistent law of the universe -- change? and change we must! that's our soul/sole purpose for experiencing life on our beautiful planet! and yet, one of the most common complaints marriage counsellors hear is, "i just don't know, he/she has CHANGED.." i should hope so, for when we fail to recognize and obey the holy command of change, the result is the crippled state of human relationships most people dwell in today--depressed, complacent, resentful and desperately afraid of making a change they know would deliver them, which is quite simply to BE AUTHENTIC, no matter the cost. how can the dance of love relationships survive the alchemy of change? we need to get real about the nature of human spirit, which is more like a traveling wind than a dense clay that can be shaped by others. relationships are not here to serve us, nor are we here to be completed by another. the fundamental myth about love that we've all downloaded from disney (i cannot live without my prince/ess) must be dethroned as a first step to enlightened relating. we are whole all by ourselves. the entire universe ever-expanding in infinite creative possibility is always unfolding within us. in this context, relating with other human being(s) becomes a GIFT, not a requirement for us to feel content or fulfilled. strangely, this outmoded paradigm of relationship feels very very comfortable. in fact the sensation of another person completing the fragmented parts of us could easily be called love itself. and for this reason, we are constantly let down when we realize that this enmeshed version of relationship is like stringing two magnificent birds together and hoping they can fly. conjoined wings cannot soar. we must let go, we must encourage every soul on the planet to spread its wings and ride the winds of change, especially our partners. "imagine no possession, i wonder if you can?" this is the only verse where john lennon poses a question to his imaginings, which gives us an idea of the magnitude of jealousy's force in our lives. to be free of possessing would be to uproot the tangle of emotional attachments and expectations we have on the people we claim to love. no possession would mean that we don't just tolerate the myriad of changes our loved ones experience, we encourage them to boldly embrace every aspect of themselves and proclaim the authenticity of their beings. it doesn't mean we condone their weaknesses, it means we allow life to instruct on how to transform them. it means we allow people and experiences to shape our beloveds with the omniscience and power that only LIFE can offer. our partners are not the only source of support, love, affection, compassion, instruction, and reflection our spirit requires. that we are all fundamentally connected tells us that our support system extends to every soul on the planet. let's accept the orbiting of stars and souls. let's accept that the layers of human connection cannot be adequately labeled in the black and white categories of "friend" or "lover." there are far more shades in between, merging and blending the definitions, or throwing them out all together, so that the human spirit can do what it came to do. love without limits.