The 96 kinds of love in need of words

So, I read somewhere that Sanskrit has 96 words for love.  Persian has 80.  The Greeks differentiated between three types of love.  We have just the one word.  Love.  LOVE.  LOVE for love’s sake!  How can we be so deprived?  So lacking in discrimination and imagination and…love?

That one poor overworked word has to cover everything from fondness (I love baked beans on toast) right through to total overwhelming (I can’t breathe without you) adoration.  If I were the word ‘love’, I’d be not only confused but exhausted. 

I mean… just think about it.  Oh, wait, how can one think about love?  Okay, just feel about it.   So I made a quick list while I was drinking a mug of mint and licorice tea, the kind I love - see?)…and, you know what, 96 is just the beginning… 

So, we have ...

      1. Liking a lot love

      2. Fond love.  

      3.  Hits the spot on occasions love.

      4.    Dear old friend love.

5.  Love one has for one's child (that one likes).

6.  Disliked child love (yes, of course you can love someone while disliking them).

7.  Duty love.

8.  Familial love (combined with liking)

9.  Familial love (combined with fundamental disliking)

10. Fuzzy warm feeling love.

11. Slightly confused – I like you more than I probably should – love.

12. Take your breath away love.

13. Slightly dazed and overawed love.

14. Slightly sickly fluffy New Age love.

15. Total lust love.

16. Wildly inappropriate love.

17. Love you have for someone or something that makes you feel somewhat embarrassed.

18. Guilty, secretive and painful love.

19. Hopeless lorn love.

20. Pleasure and pain love.

21. Bit bored love.

22. Taking for granted love.

23. Habit/going through the motions love.

25. Love that has gone past its sell-by date – slightly mouldy love.

26. Exhilarating frisson down the spine and throb in the groin love.

27. First sweet love. 

28. Idealistic/courtly/on a pedestal love.

30. Misunderstood love – loving what isn’t.

32. Bruised love.

33. Making do love (while waiting for something better).

34. Comfy like an old sofa love.

35. Guilty and yet highly pleasurable love (yes, nuances between this and #18).

36. Forbidden love (can have an essence of ‘fuck you!’ love).

37. Decadent love.

38. Wildly depraved love.  Yes, there’s a difference between decadent and depraved.

39. Innocent sweet love.

40. Adoring from afar love.

41. Spiritual love.

42. Religious extremism love.

43. Religious sexualised love (Teresa de Avila type).

44. Passionate rip your knickers off love.   

45. Some days I can’t stop thinking about you and other days I wonder why I’m wasting my time love.

46. Only when you’re drunk as a skunk love.

47. Passion that has died but leaves traces of fondness.

48. Sad lorn despairing love.

49. Angry vicious stab you in the heart love.

50. Bitter and twisted stab you in the back love.

51. Maudlin weeping and writing poetry love.

52. Possessive love.

53. Controlling love.

54. Unconditional love.

55. Wistful sighing and staring out of windows love.

56. Protective I'd take a grenade for you love.

57. Half-hearted love.

58. Torn in half and thrown to the wolves love.

59. Projected love.

60. Deluded love.

61. Provisional love.

62. Cruel love.

63. Sexual love without liking.

64. Tender love.

65. Like an itch you can’t scratch love.

66. Dark tormented love.

67. Love you only feel in the middle of the night or on long journeys.

68. Dream love.

69. Second-best love.

70. Tantalising love.

71. Adoration from afar love.

72. Love for the idealised potential lover you haven't yet met.

73. Misplaced love.

74. Bouncy overenthusiastic love.

75. Revoltingly oversentimentalised love.

76. Fake love.

77. Smug love.

78. Deeply conditional love.

79. In love with the idea of someone love.

80. Love that is totally and utterly reciprocated.

81. Uneven love.

82. Dutiful love.

83. You know damn well we’d go crazy without one another love.

84. Very complicated love.

85. Soul mate love.

86. Push me-pull me love.

87. Love for someone you don’t know and haven't met.

88. Stalemate love.

89. Loving everyone and everything love.

90. Purely for the sex love.

91. I don’t really love you but I don’t want anyone else to have you love.

92. Simple joyous playful bounding like puppies love.

93. I love you more than you love me point-scoring love.

94. Over-intellectualised love.

95. Snobbish love.

96. Kept apart by circumstances love.

Okay, so this was top-of-head (should that be heart?) stuff and there may be some which are sort of the same thing and equally many more that need consideration.  Not to mention the Love that passes all understanding...the heart-beat of Creation.    
But hey...your thoughts? 

Oh, and, if there are any Sanskrit speakers/readers out there, I'd be really interested to have a run-down of the 96 and their meanings.  

On undyeing

I decided to undye my hair. I didn’t even know you could do that until I had not lunch with my friend Rachel (font of all hairdressing knowledge) and she told me you can get this stuff that just take out all the fake colour from your hair leaving it…virgin. 

So why did I want to do it? Why now?  Well I’m not entirely sure but maybe it’s because I’ve been looking through old photographs again and I just sort of wondered what the hell colour my hair is now – cos, seriously, it’s been thirty years since I looked.  And when I was very young it was…this colour…  

Well, actually, that looks a bit light. Could be the film. But, if not, wasn't it nice of my parents to design a whole room around my hair? Or maybe they just wanted me to blend in. 

This is a bit more accurate (at least according to my memory which is, as we know, not too good).  Yes, that's my foot (bad habits start young). No, those weren't my glasses.  

Anyhow. I bought a box of stuff called Decolour Remover. Nice, no-nonsense name there.  ‘Safely removes all types of artificial colour pigments’ it said. So there are unsafe types?  ‘Ultra kind,’ it said.  Hmm, does that mean it proffers tissues and pats you on the back when your original hair colour proves to be solid grey?  ‘Precision “non-drip” cream’ it said.  Well, fine. Whatever.

So it sat on my bathroom shelf for…weeks.  Cos, really, I kinda got a bit scared.  And then, one day, I just thought, sod it. It’s only hair. I can always cut it off or dye it if it’s ghastly. 

Except. No instructions and no plastic gloves. Now the gloves weren’t a problem (I have a whole box of surgical gloves – don’t ask) but the instructions were kinda vital.  So I told the guys from Decolour and a nice chap sent me another box, no questions asked.  So now I had two boxes. But hey, I also have a helluva lot of hair.

First up. The “non drip” thing – might be great once it’s on the hair but the bloody stuff wouldn’t come out the bottle.  Second up. It stinks. Really stinks. ‘No ammonia, bleach or peroxide’ it says. So they must have used extract of cat piss instead. 

But hey.  It sort of worked.  Okay, I missed a few bits and the ends are still suspiciously dark but…yeah.

And I was quite pleased.  Except…

‘What have you done to your hair?’ said James.

‘I’ve undyed it,’ I said.

‘Huh?’

‘This is the real me.’

‘I’m not sure I like the real you.’

‘What?’  Cue hurt look.

‘Nah. I mean, I do like the real you. Of course I do. It’s just I hadn’t realized what the real you was.’

‘Huh?’

‘You said your natural hair colour was red.’

‘It is.’

‘Nah. It’s ginger.’

What?  After all these years of teaching my boy to know that racism, sexism, homophobia and so on are all totally risible – and I’ve brought up a gingist?  Holy smoke.

‘It’s okay, Mum. I love you. Even though you’re a ginger.’

‘Unconditional love, huh?’

‘You bet.’

PS. Apologies if you thought this was going to be a post on rejuvenation or immortality. It's all in the e.  :-)

Love and shit

Yesterday was a strange day. You ever have those days when you keep trying to convince yourself that everything is fine, that all the crap is just in your head (which, of course is it)?  But then the crap just keeps throwing itself at you – quite literally.  That was yesterday. My boy was home sick (literally) again. The phone kept ringing. The doorbell kept ringing. I kept having to race out into town and then come back to find I’d missed deliveries, missed calls, missed people.  It was a missing day.  And then my brother phoned, from the US, and we hadn’t spoken for ages – and he always phones me from his cell-phone as he drives the highway, pausing every so often to pay a toll. Only yesterday, we’d been on the phone for all of five minutes when the SP came in, looked at me and vomited shit at my feet. 

‘Call me back, Chris,’ I said. ‘Give me ten minutes.’ So he did and I cleaned it up and then he phoned again and then James called, ‘He’s done it again!’ so I sighed and Chris said ‘I’ll give you fifteen.’ And I cleaned up a small dog’s bodyweight in crap.  And then he phoned again and we talked again and he said, ‘How’s work?’ And I laughed.  And he said, ‘So what are you doing?’ So I said ‘Meditating mainly.’ And he didn’t laugh but sounded wistful. ‘I should be doing that,’ he said. ‘And I will. When I have time.’ Which made me sad.

And yesterday I saw a lot of sadness, a lot of pain. I heard a lot of pain. I felt a lot of pain. And, FFS, a dog bit a man in the face in the pub.

And I wasn’t going to blog today.  But here I am.  Because today is a new day. Fresh start. Capital letter.  And I woke up with a song in my head and a feeling that I needed to write this here and now.

Round we go, round and round. Life isn’t a line. It isn’t even a circle. It’s a labyrinth, a many-dimensional labyrinth. The paths bend and turn back on themselves all the time. And you think you’ve learned a lesson only to realise that it’s there, to be learned again, on a different level, in a different way. The Kabbalists say that there are four worlds; that there are trees within trees, overlapping, overlying.

Nothing is ever simple. Every time you think, ‘Aha! That’s it!’, the it changes. J

Of course it does. Life is change. Nothing stays the same. 

Except. Except.

One thing is very simple.

One thing never changes.

One thing remains.

Love.

Unconditional, eternal Love.

Yes, really.

Beyond all grief, all suffering, all surface flurry and drama and angst.  Love.

That is what lies at the heart of the Labyrinth of Light. Glowing, pulsing, a steady beating heart that never stops.  And, every so often, it explodes into blinding pure Light. That connects you to Everything.

And then there is no loss, no pain, no separation.

Have you felt it?  If so, you won’t need my puny words to understand.

If you haven’t, you will just have to trust me. It is there.

Yes, yes, you’re saying. (I can hear you, you know.) You say, we all know love – for friends, for family, for lovers, for animals, for Nature, for money, for whatever. Yeah yeah...

But. Love?

Transcendent and imminent at the same time?  That, above all else, is what I’ve learned in the Labyrinth, in this last year. That is, at heart, the One Thing (for me).

And I can sense you (some of you) going, ‘Ick.’ Soft and woolly, fluffy unicorns and rainbow dolphins. New Age, vapid meaningless words. ‘Love you.’ ‘Love you too.’ 'Love you more.' Lovey lovely.

No.  Hell no.

Love is awesome. Love blows your socks off. Love is bloody smite me sideways with a whacking great sword into seven shades of eternity. There is nothing remotely fluffy unicorn about it.

I’ve written about it before, of course. And doubtless I will again. Because that’s what happens, you walk down the same path many times.

If you did a word cloud of Marek’s books I’m willing to bet the biggest word would be LOVE.  Why?  This, from one of his Authonomy threads…

‘When you feel Unconditional Love, you want everybody else to feel it. And when you see that they don’t bother, too busy abusing their surface minds, you cannot be absolutely happy. Unless you’re a dogged egoist.’

Ah. So much to say. Nothing to say.

It’s Advent. The run-up to Christ Mass. Hmm, come to think of it, a good time to read Pro Vocation. A ‘serious joke’. I wonder when my copy will arrive? :)