A Sufi approach to life has grown on me, particularly in its spiritual view.
Love, according to the wise ones, is both masculine and/or feminine. “I love you,” is clearly masculine, while “I am waiting for you; I am longing for you,” suggests the feminine side.
After reading just a few pages of the book, “The Call & The Echo, Sufi Dreamwork & the Psychology of the Beloved,” by Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee [Threshold, 1992], I became aware my life has been one long “longing.” (Hint: “Why Must I Be a Teenager in Love?” was my favorite song as a youngster. I started yearning for and longing for love way back when . . .Boy, it hurt so bad I never thought I would ever get over my many heart aches and pains during my life as a teenager.)
And so, I offer this passage from the book. From one longing to be with the Beloved, to another:
Give me the pain of Love, The Pain of Love for Thee!
Not the Joy of Love, just the Pain of Love.
And I will pay the price, any price you ask!
All myself I will offer for it, and the price you will ask on top of it!
Keep the joy for others, give me the Pain.
And gladly will I pay for the Pain of Love!
— Irana Tweedie, unpublished quotation
Contoveros 
[…] I just started reading “The Call and The Echo,” by the same author. It was is so moving that I too wrote a post, quoting the book. See Longing […]
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Yes, this was beautiful. Although I don’t believe pure love to be two-sided I can relate to the masculine and feminine approach on the subject. I am interested to hear your meaning of the blog title: “Longing Creates Love for Ever More”.
Is longing for love everlasting?
Is pain rooted in love?
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inwardsun,
I long to be with Love, and to be in love with Love. (you can plug-in someone’s name if you like.)
Love for me starts with the yearning to be accepted by Love, to be “liked” and to feel that I am a part of their side, their team, their plans for now and a thousand tomorrows.
“Longing” triggers my love. It is that palpable warmth that starts to flow inside of me when I think of “being in love.” Love is delicious to the taste, but with a hint of sadness, actually a permanent, ever so slight trace of a pain. A pain that sweetly advises me that I can not always be with my Love. That I must go about the business of the world, dress the part of who I am projecting to be, and show a mask of a face that spells out strength and confidence.
The truth inside, however, is quite different. I am but a small, lonely child that stores within an abundance of free love to share with everyone, but who is afraid the love will be rejected because it is not pure enough, or that it may seem to come with strings attached, or with an ulterior motive to simply receive as much comfort for myself as I desperately want to give and to offer to comfort You.
My Love aches. It cries out for its tears to be touched, wiped away, and to be assured that this feeling will still be there the next morning when You could realize how much of a fraud I really am, a fraud unworthy to blessed with Your unbelievable reciprocal feelings.
I don’t deserve such everfescent happiness. Let me see but a smile on my Lover’s face — Your Face — a smile from the eyes, from the heart, from that vast pool of love that washes me clean, renews my resolve, and revives me as if I were a gentle flower opening to the morning sun after the heaviest night of rain, and I will be satisfied that life could now come to an end.
What more can we ask upon our death than to be in Love and know at the moment of departure that True Love was, and is, Ever more.
Michael, The Lover
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You are clearly a man in love (and perhaps also a boy in fear)
I believe…
Love is the room we are made of but too blind to see. Only as reflections of each other can we truly be…
In Love.
Longing must be all the fumbling in the dark we do, for deep down we know our wildest dreams have already come true.
We need only to turn on the light.
🙂
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in ward sun,
You are truly and deliciously . . .
wicked.
Am I reflecting that Love from my hidden room?
Can you see?
Or are you as blind as this boy fears to be?
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Well, somehow, we are able “to see” with many other senses than our vision.
Perhaps you are reflecting the Love I have in me.
I think too much light can blindside us to go even further into this rabbit hole.
But to meet you half way, for we are both believers, I have been in moments of Love, but most often, in Longing.
“truly and deliciously . . .
wicked”
Wow! 🙂
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inwardsun,
Rabbits in a whole multiply if they long to see the light.
Do you?
At least, halfway?
Reflect on me.
Smile, just a little
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My name, Helen, means Light in Greek. You would know.
Smiling is a reflection of Love. And that’s all I need to know.
🙂
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Son of my father
loves Helen.
Today.
Now.
True Love
Calls
Thee,
Shine
Light
of Net
For
Ever
More!
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Belle,
You don’t know how long I have longed to hear you say that.
Ok, maybe that was a line created through what we Greeks call the fine art of “skatalogy.”
Still, it is in the longing that we first taste the bitter-sweet nature of love. Excuse me, while I take another sip of this Sufi beverage . . .
Michael J
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Hey, I don’t know what skatalogy means… but confused as I might be, I hereby encourage more partaking of that Sufi beverage!
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Michael, thank you so much for posting this! You are making my Amazon “1-click” start flashing like a beacon, lol. The pain of divine longing is such a strange thing. Sometimes I want to scream, other times the emotion of it sweeps me away.
It has certainly brought me to a deeper place of beingness. And for that – well, there are no words.
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Uh, What’s an Amazon “one-click?”
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