The Soul in Love
The soul manifests its innate tendency towards attachment in many ways. Yet, only will the mystery of fate determine what the purpose of the soul in love really means.
What is the Soul in Love?
James Hillman once said, the anima, is the feminine urge of the soul, a guide to the unconsciousness, the journey into the unknown abyss of rhetorical life. The soul in love is an unknown sanction. According to John of the Cross, if you want certainty in your path, walk in darkness. Much of our life takes place in the darkness, in the uncertainty of what will come next or what the future holds. The darkness is where the soul takes hold, it is beneficial for the soul. In love, madness is condoned as heroic and even possibly delusional. Emotions are turned high, and fantasy goes into high gear. Romantic love is not only a necessary illusion; it is a desirable deception. Naturally, if we enter the illusion without an appreciation for the art of love, we may as well render ourselves a fool to the illusionary outcomes of it. However, if we learn to grow and appreciate the drama that it brings into our lives, we can fondly deepen our attachment towards others in it. When we take hold and embrace the illusion of romantic love, we may be able to discern our expectations from our partners versus altering their personal short-comings.
In love, we have to remember the illusion is just the beginning. It is just the imagination. It is only the beginning of the journey of the soul in love. When we’re in love life feels limitless like there is enough potential to sustain the universe. But the relationship and marriage ask so much more of us than imagination. It asks for endurance and discipline – nay, discipleship.
How do we create discipleship in our marriage?
That word can feel testing for others who have been blamed and discriminated against by the church. However, the Latin word for disciple is a pupil or to learn. In discipleship, we get rid of illusionary love and we begin to learn about the other person. It is less of what Jung calls a projection of our anima or animus on the individual but a tolerance and an education in what the other person calls from us. Caring for the soul in marriage means not only honoring fate but allowing the will of God to supersede the ego of the human condition. Some human marriages turn out as pure disasters; but even then, we can honor the stars that brought the two of them together. The fatefulness of a relationship may appear not only as extraordinary circumstances or synchronicities, but also as an element in the most ordinary events where it isn’t even appropriate to take full credit for what has happened. The soul in love has no better orchestration than the purpose of the union or bond between two individuals. If an individual’s career has taken off due to the partnership, it is retrospective to assume that spirit may have been at work in their coordination of these two individuals joining together. That is where a spiritual attitude towards love becomes developmental in the construction of respecting the fabric of its purpose in our lives. When we respect the providence of a spiritual attitude in love and honor what the universe has called us towards a greater more thoughtful intimacy develops between the two union of the individual’s souls. A person in love, is something deeply profound, like an animal lying at the very heart of the relationship. In Thomas Moore’s book Soulmates, he speaks to various different archetypes one inclusive of the Coyote. There was once a feminine woman who had the ability to provide all of the mercantile for the township. Men would come before her feet and provide her with an assortment of various supplies needed. Yet, the woman who could weave and embroider here own beautifully ladened cloth would deny them access. Until, there was an onlooker who took interest in the maiden and decided to offer her not goods but a dance. The man dressed up as a coyote in the township and danced a wild dance to the beat of her heart and in his pocket, he had black currents.
The Coyote is the Soul in Love
Unbeknownst to the maiden, she found favor in his offer. We cannot deny what the soul craves. We can only render its position and accept fate as this profoundly organic occurrence that makes no sense to the societal construction that bounds its limitations. The coyote in love is the song of the soul. It is the weeping underneath the moonlight, urging for its companion to come forth. It is the hymn of the violin.
The hymn of the violin is not always a beautiful melody. Sometimes it is a sorrowful one, a song of longing, of separation, of the profound uncertainty that comes with loving another human being. Yet, perhaps this is precisely what the soul asks of us. Not to find certainty in love, a call into the dark knight of the soul, nor to demand that another person fulfill the fantasy we have created of them, but to surrender to the mystery of what love has come to teach us.
The soul does not always recognize love through reason. It recognizes something far more ancient, something that exists beneath the intellect and beyond the constructions of our carefully orchestrated lives. We may spend our entire lives searching for a love that makes sense, only to discover that the love which transforms us most profoundly is the one that asks us to relinquish our need to understand it.
This is where the illusion of romantic love becomes the discipline of loving. Where fantasy gives way to devotion, where projection becomes recognition, and where two individuals are no longer asking one another to become the embodiment of their own unconscious desires. Instead, they become pupils of one another’s souls. They learn to appreciate not only the beauty of their union, but the imperfections, contradictions, and ordinary human limitations that make intimacy possible.
Perhaps the purpose of love is not to preserve the illusion, but to allow the illusion to awaken us to something greater. To recognize that the person before us is neither our salvation nor the answer to every longing we have carried. They are another soul, with an interior world as mysterious and profound as our own. And to love them is to honor that mystery without attempting to possess it.
The coyote continues to dance, even when the music changes. The soul continues to call, even when the path ahead is obscured by darkness. And perhaps the greatest act of love is not the certainty that two people will remain together, but the willingness to encounter one another with reverence, courage, and an enduring curiosity for what has brought their souls together.
For the soul in love does not ask us to escape the darkness. It asks us to learn how to see within it.
