Love and its Consequenses

Personal Additions

June 5, 2005

Joel Akin

In all relationships there is a time when one must confront every single difficulty which arises. Love is like a large rose. It holds within its petals a symbol of promise and perfume which even the bee finds irresistable. Every petal though red, yellow or even dark colors holds a perfume known as the essence of the rose. this essence is like a cologne that wafts across the breezes of time until it reaches a receptive nose. It draws in the desire and pulls in the recipient.

• I worked in a rose garden for five summers and know a little bit about roses. They are beautiful to behold but they have sharp thorns and small thorns and irritating thorns all along their length. Grapple the stem and it can be hurtful and painful and leave you with a bloody finger or palm. Roses don't have to be painful but they are the price one pays for beauty. All beauty has its thorns if the person sees themselves as too beautiful. I speak of people here that need to realize there is a need for perfection in beauty but also a need to see themselves as beautiful inside. We look at the rose as a symbol here in Alberta. The Wild Rose stands for the purity of the prarie and spring rains and promises of a better summer. The last years have seen a drying up in our prosperity. It has crept into the public thought and desire of Canada. Mad Cow is but a consumers trait in some ways as it strips men of their reason also and puts fear in consuming what is good for you, namely beef. I look though at love as a means to an end in a sense. Love begins with hope and ends with prosperity. If we take love to its ultimate conclusions it should not end in sadness or despair but in hope.
• So how then do we deal with the fact that a rose begins to spread out its petals and wilt? How do we deal with the thorns? How can we deal with the bees that threaten to sting us in the midst of our smelling them?
• If we can answer these questions we surely must be the wisest of all men. So I will attempt to answer them to see if I have arrived as yet to say the top 100.
• Wisdom comes in when we seek it. It comes in when we ask for it. But wisdom alone is never enough as I have learned. There must be three parts as I have found.
• Wisdom stands on its own when it is the wisdom of men . Wisdom is best described as a way to find out about a problem and solve it. If I desire to know why roses die then I must know what seasons are. Or what causes a rose to grow in the first place. Or what the rose variety is. Or the color of the rose. In reality there are a thousand problems that crop up in trying to answer everyones quest for knowledge which is the second step . You must first be smart enough to know there is a problem and a solution to that problem. But even when you understand Wisdom, seek it, seek knowledge that comes from learning to think you are still faced with the biggest dilemna of all. Understanding. I can read a thousand books and have all knowledge but do I have understanding? Do I have Wisdom?
• In a dream I had once I was in a vast library with all the sages of the ages. I wanted to show them I knew the solution to a problem a man was showing on the blackboard. It was a complex equation and men of all ages gathered in groups hoping one of them might know the answer. I strived with all my might to scream out the answer but I was totally invisible to everyone and flew from person to person like an invisible wraith. No one answered and all the knowledge and all its wisdom from all ages was right there. And they knew it all but they could not discern understanding.
• Understanding is love. Love is understanding. This may sound like an impossible solution but its not. Love takes all the problems and all the solutions and equates itself into a complex equation which results in a simple conclusion. Love is the answer. I guess we all like to think we have understanding but the fact is we don't. It takes generations to find this solution and we never really understand it because we rarely understand ourselves. We live with complex questions and seek so much K&W but end up with little to show for it. Those who seek it will eventually find it but the end result is we don't find anything of worth in ourselves. We find only confusion.
• The answer to the dying petals really comes down to one answer. Life leads to love and love is the center of life. We could heal ourselves as a nation if we learned to bring love back to its center. We cannot ever reach an equation of love until we strip death of its power and restore perfection back to the world. Perfection alone is the quest for the perfection of understanding. When I reach the last days of life and find myself looking up at the stars I don't expect to see only darkness and despair. I expect to see stars. I expect to see shooting stars and aurora borealis's and comets and the moon and all the good things of life. I expect to see satellites and ships traveling to the stars and people holding on to their promises.
• We live in such a dark world that love has lost its shine and become a passion for sex or darkness. Its not. Love and its purity are dwelling in the center of Gods plan for us. He is filled with love and has surprised us with all the good things yet to come. I look forward to this time with a gleam of delight in my eye because I know that which is coming will surpass anything that human insight or wisdom has ever imagined.