His and Her Fashion Trends
With everyone talking about the “his and her fashion trends”, I’ve found myself looking more and more at couples and wedding lists. I love seeing these couples and love seeing how they somehow perfectly match each other, sometimes perfectly coordinated and sometimes just a perfect blend of different prints and textures, couples are a Trend!
When couples unite in marriage, their personal union draws its power from the cosmic marriage that underlies the whole of existence — the bonding of the divine masculine and feminine energies emerging from the Creator's Infinite Light to generate existence, a world, and life.
The essence of marriage is to become one. If man and woman would have simply remained the "single being" that they initially were, there would have been no alienation, no mystery, no reunion; no marriage. If they would have been initially created as two distinct beings, the gap of difference would have been insurmountable — there would be no way for them to become truly one. It is their intrinsic oneness, coupled with their acquired distinctiveness and difference, that is the secret of marriage, of creation, of life.
Love is a paradox. It is the most altruistic and the most selfish of human emotions. The most giving and the most fulfilling. The most spiritual and the most physical. The most natural and the most irrational. The source of our deepest pleasures and our deepest agonies.
"I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine; he browses among the lilies." SONG OF SOLOMON 6:3
But ... there is also a level of ownership inside the marriage relationship. The Song of Songs says it this way – “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” The level of love between a couple can sometimes be summed up by all of activities that we get involved in that we would never initiate on our own. The only reason why we watch that movie, or go shopping together is because we are owned. The most enduring relationships are the ones where we are willing to sacrifice for each other – we are owned – and because of love, we would have it no other way.
“I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate then when I fall asleep your eyes close.”
– Pablo Neruda
The key to love is selflessness, and the fulfillment it brings. As counter-intuitive as it may sound, the ostensibly self-consumed, egotistical human being can gain no greater satisfaction than through giving and committing.
The core of love is the union of a man and a woman in body and in spirit. When that union is made under the conditions it deserves, with the right preparations and mindful focus, its waves ripple outward through substance of reality. No facet of the cosmos is left untouched, unaltered. Every voice of the Creation resonates in unison as an orchestra plays back the soloist's melody. And so the lives of that couple, their children and their children's children are filled with the music of the heavens down on earth.
Nothing is more sacred than this union, the very fount of life itself. And nothing is more crucial to our mission in this world.
The late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr once said: "We must discover the power of love, the redemptive power of love. And when we discover that, we will be able to make of this old world a new world, for love is the only way."
That's what love is. Love is not selfish and self-centered. Love can be sacrificial, and in so doing, becomes redemptive. And that way of unselfish, sacrificial, redemptive love changes lives, and it can change this world.
All of life, all of being, depends on the harmony of a couple, a harmony placed in our hands and hearts. That it is why, for most of us, it presents the greatest challenges we ever face.
From the Song of Solomon, in the Bible:
