Is Love really a friend?

Well here it is the bones of the question which has haunted me since 5th december 1997.

My life has been empty since April 2000 when I walked away from "my muse". I had struggled since falling in love Christmas 1997 knowing that this was the trap my whole life had been preparing itself for. It has been the most beautiful and incomparable experience I can imagine something which I have completely failed to replace or overcome in the 10 years that have followed. This morning i awake finally defeated: there is nothing in all this world that compares to love. To lose love is to lose the only thing that really matters in existence, and i suppose many people have been to that conclusion before and decided that existence is no longer worth having if it cannot be in love.

Well it has not be for want of trying. I've seen my life has been in two halves. Those days before 5th december when I was searching and those days after 17th April 2000 when I walked away from what I knew in my heart was this life's destiny, dousing the fire that lit my soul. The pain more than anything is the abandoning of oneself like a child on a windswept beach beneath a bleak sky and before an unforgiving sea; and like a barren beach: what remains of life when love has gone.

i had always believed myself stronger than this, too powerful and carefree to become tied down. I have loved before and each time more or less I have walked away with some pain but always arisen again to my old self. But this time on 5th december 1997 i knew with ecstatic horror that I had met my nemesis, and with all caution put to death, with reckless abandon, I gave myself up to the irresistable winds of destiny.

I have come to this because of sleepless nights last week. I have just completed a sailing course and am now a qualified novice sailor. I expected that the pleasure of new skill, a new way of communing with my greatest hope in life, the all encompassing hand of nature, might lift my spirits and bring me new life, the scent of a wind to carry me out of the stagnant becalmed waters I have become abandoned in. But while the pleasure and sense of achievement has risen it has only shown me how hopeless my task is. There is only one mountain in the plain of this life and no matter how far I travel away from it, it soars above all else through the clouds and into the realm of the sun into the boundless skies where she wears her heart in the rich colours of heavenly transience.

There is no escape from this. I have tried everything. I am a rational and sensible person, not given to senseless folly, cautious and critical and yet look as I may with every power of my inner eye, sometimes she can weaken under the unrelenting power of scrutiny and the scourge of unforgiving examination, but as soon as my mind is away she is back as powerful and beautiful as before and only by closing my eyes from love's brilliance can I gain any freedom.

This love is not my friend. It has poisoned me like a drug for which my soul yearns to the point of self extinction. Why did I know this would happen to me and yet abandon myself all the same? What masocism brought me back to this world so that I could torment myself in the cradle of a tempress of such power?

The reason is that life seems to have no meaning in the lands beyond the love. It is a featurless landscape where nothing grows. You can sow and toil all spring and summer but nothing survives to reap a harvest. I have tried.

And so I have only two choices. Either to turn back into the lands of the beautiful flame as I always expected myself to do. But now the gates of the mountain pass are locked by death and I would need to search for other ranges and abodes. Or as I have resolved this morning to realise my insights of 1997; that this love is not my friend. It is a sweet trap whose very power is that I do not want to let it go.

My every argument inside goes that it's very beauty is its goodness. That because there is no greater beauty that there can be no greater goodness. But if I see Beauty for what I might be, a snare and bated trap, siren upon the rocks which would dash this boat and feast upon its mortal flesh: if this is what Beauty really is then I have only one conclusion. I have been looking at life all wrong! That is why it is empty, that is why the wind has fallen from my sails.

Alva is the name of a boat, but I have been a bad helmsman. Is not the search for wind in the direction of attraction and beauty the wrong way? That the drug addict who steers his boat and sets his sails on the fixation of a chemical routine not missing the wind?

Life is not best lived in the grip of attraction and the shining hopes and mirages of beauty and what is likeable. We argue with ourselves that how can that which is so desirable not be the right thing to grasp? That if we do not grasp this, then what are we to grasp? And without things to grasp we grasp instead for bleakness, hopelessness and even lifelessness. It is exactly because they are so beautiful and attractive which should be our warning! It is not a struggle to overcome that which is beautiful, to somehow see through it and see it as not beautiful again, but more deeply to see that what is so beautiful that it overpowers us and leaves us destroyed, is a danger to us and something to avoid.

In the overwhelming attraction of beauty lies the very reason not to be attracted! Maybe my wisdom was alive in 1997 because I knew all along my test was to walk away from this shining beacon of destiny, hope and beauty: and yet I could not and that became the puzzle. It is because I could not, that i should! and the more I could not the more I should.

See attraction for what it is and abandon attraction!
A life steered in the winds of attraction is not a life lived,
But a life heading toward death.

So the new question is this. Abandoning the fixation of seeing life as a series of attraction: gains and losses: is there a new wind to tack into or is there a peaceful falling out of the wind all together?