It’s been a handful of years that I’ve lived somewhere with a true winter. Meaning sub-zero temperatures, snowfall, slippery front porch, freezing cold limbs, icey nose, etc. I’ve definitely become quite a wimp in relation to all of these things. But I’ve got a lot of months ahead of me still, so I’m sure I’ll get used to it.

It reminds me that winter is a time of The Great Sleep for all sorts of things. Trees, plants, soil, bugs, and sometimes for people too. Going inward, darker days. Darker times.

I’m not entirely sure how I’ll tackle the contents of this blog. Most of the stuff that’s on my mind these days is pretty personal. I’m a private person. So I’d like to find a way to express those thoughts/feelings/experiences in a way that can be shared. I think I know how to do this.

I’ll start with a quote that I found interesting the other day:

From John Welwood’s book *Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships: Healing the Wound of the Heart*:

“Everyone knows perfect love in their heart, for the human heart
is a direct channel through which absolute love pours into this world. At
the same time, human relationships are imperfect expressions of that
love. This creates a painful gap between the perfect love we know in our
hearts and the imperfect, incomplete ways it is expressed in our
relationships. When we imagine that relative human love should be
something it is not — absolutely unconditional — we suffer disappointment
and wind up distrusting love itself. We also hold grievances against others
for not loving us rightly or against ourselves for not having won that love.
This gives rise to a universal human wound — the sense of not feeling
loved for who we are.”

Well, this explains a lot. Afterall, we’re just humans tumbling through time and space, learning as we go, growing as we learn, changing all the time, staying the same all the time. After I read this I asked myself “so then what, is most important?”. If relationships are most often a strange manifestation of love, then what are the most important elements need to gel two people together? How do two people accept the turbulence of a relationship, know that it is still worth it, if we can’t expect to be happy all the time? How do we know when it is time to walk away, or just time to pushing on? What needs to be there? It must be different for each person, each couple. And, can that important thing change over time? And then what?

In a different piece of writing, Welwood talks about the “relationship as charnel ground”:

“It’s a place to die and be born, equally, at the same time, it’s simply our raw and rugged nature, the ground where we constantly puke and fall down, constantly make a mess. We are constantly dying, we are constantly giving birth. We are eating in the charnel ground, sitting in it, sleeping on it, having nightmares on it… Yet it does not try to hide its truth about reality. There are corpses lying all over the place loose arms, loose hands, loose internal organs, and flowing hairs all over the place, jackals and vultures are roaming about, each one devising its own scheme for getting the best piece of flesh.
Many of us have a cartoon notion of relational bliss: that it should provide a steady state of security or solace that will save us from having to face the gritty, painful, difficult areas of life. We imagine that finding or marrying the right person will spare us from having to deal with such things as loneliness, disappointment, despair, terror, or disintegration.
Yet anyone who has been married for a long time probably has some knowledge of the charnel ground quality of relationship— corpses all over the place, and jackals and vultures roaming about looking for the best piece of flesh. Trungpa suggests that if we can work with the “raw and rugged situation” of the charnel ground, “then some spark or sympathy or compassion, some giving in or opening can begin to take place. The chaos that takes place in your neurosis is the only home ground that you can build the mandala of awakening on.” This last sentence is a powerful one, for it suggests that awakening happens only through facing the chaos of our neurotic patterns. Yet this is often the last thing we want to deal with in relationships.”

When is too much chaos, too much chaos?