Hello world!
I just watched again the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice with Keira Knightley and Matthew MacFadyen. I freely admit to being a romantic and of course I cried as the story I know so well resolved so beautifully once again.
Everywhere I look I see evidence of the presence of this happily-ever-after reality already always there just waiting for us to finally see it and embrace it and allow ourselves to be embraced by it. Of course it is as simple and as natural as love– an amazing and stubborn love that can respond with power and clarity and strength to whatever arises.
Relaxing into that natural state, awakening to it as it were, is only complex because we have made it so. In Pride and Prejudice the social constructs hamper and threaten to derail at every step of the way but in the case of both the eldest sisters direct experience–a love that defies norms and expectations and every convention and construct–wins out and expresses itself and brings with it a fulness of life that it took amazing courage to hope for and to hold out for.
This story, like so many great stories, speaks to the power of this direct experience, this kind of love. Those who dismiss it as empty romanticism I suspect have never experienced it or have been burnt by it and have recoiled in fear. Of course it burns and one is not fully alive until it consumes one “body and soul”.
Constructs are not meaninglessness. They arise in response to life conditions and are often rooted in wisdom and experience and thus serve, but, they must always be superseded by direct experience. Kirkegaard’s primacy of direct revelation is I think just theistic language for the same thing.
Becoming aware of the constructs that form our sense of ourselves and our society does not mean that we see them as all bad or to be destroyed but that they are not the ultimate truth nor the highest authority nor do they have a claim on our hearts.
We live in a world of constructs–some creative and freeing and some neurotic and oppressive. Once we see them for what they are and ourselves as not them and not defined by them then they are there to serve us not we them. We become free to create and express in this world of form and construct and to align it with the highest and deepest reality that is unfolding within us and through us.
Sigh–I love a love story!
Love,
Lewis