Falling in love: Part Thirty: Marc Gafni

Running and Returning

This movement — what the mystics called “running and returning” — is the core dance of the sexual.

Here again, the sexual models the erotic. The cherubs hold each other. The passionately intertwined cherubs, symbols of the sexual, teach us how to be lovers in life, guide us in the need to run — to merge – but then to return. We fall in love. We achieve orgasm. We touch ecstasy.

As Emily Dickinson pens:

The Drop, that wrestles in the Sea — 
Forgets her own locality — 
As I — toward Thee — 
She knows herself an incense small — 
Yet small — she sighs — if All — is All — 
How larger — be?

But then the drop needs to gently kiss the sea goodbye and go back to being a separate glorious raindrop. The fall from love, ecstasy, and orgasm, much like the fall from Eden, is not a personal or a cosmic catastrophe. Rather it is the natural process of our becoming fully human. We fall back into our separate selves, yet we are enlightened with the memory of union.

Slowly, step by searching step, we try to retrace our path to Eden. We begin to expand the ego little by little to make space for our beloved, for all those outside our immediate circle of caring. We set our faces towards each other and begin the process of “rising in love”. We are drawn forward by the promise of what we have already glimpsed.

The gifts we received in arousal from above. We hold those moments both as treasures in our memory, as well as treasure maps that lead us back to those hidden depths — for sometimes the greatest treasure is the map itself. The greatest treasure is the trek.

marc gafni
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