Paradoxical

Love is a thing twoness.
But underneath any twoness, man is alone.

And underneath the great turbulent emotions of love, the violent herbage,
lies the living rock of a single creature’s price,
the dark, naïf pride.
And deeper even than the bedrock of pride
lies the ponderous fire of naked life
with its strange primordial consciousness of justice
and its primordial consciousness of connection,
connection with still deeper, still more terrible life-fire
and the old, old final life-truth.

From Deeper Than Love by D.H. Lawrence

Up until very recently, I wholeheartedly believed Lawrence’s sentiment on love.

But I’ve come, I think, to a more accurate understanding of love and, perhaps, in the nature of Truth itself … and that is this:

Tucked within the interstices of opposites, Truth is to be found. Objective Truth (as far as human beings can perceive it) is a paradoxical interplay between antithetical forces.

I think Lawrence misses the point. In that place where one feels most alone, is also where one may truly experience the connectedness of all things. Love is not twoness … it is, in fact, the experience of oneness.

Why one must plumb the cavernous depths of solitude to discover this is paradoxical. If you have ever lost a loved one, or have been completely alone in this world without a hand to hold, reflect deeply on it … because it is in that devastating experience of loss and isolation where one recognizes how important and essential it is to love and be loved by other human beings.

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