Ordinary Love and Outrageous Love – Part 1
An unedited first draft text from the forthcoming book The Path and Practice of Outrageous Love by Marc Gafni and Kristina Kincaid
Love is not the Answer
For generations, wise people, mystics, religious leaders and self-help gurus have told us that love is the answer. We can find meaning, they told us, in love. In the love of the beloved. In the love of family. In love of community. In love of work. In love of country. In Love of God. In Love of humanity. But again – if we are really honest with ourselves, it doesn’t seem to be working. Our big experience of love is often short lived by romantic highs, or buddy bonding moments. Or the obligations of love that define our lives. A sustained experience of True ecstatic, profound and pulsating Love, how many of us can say we have that?
It was a half a century ago that John Lennon sang “love is the answer and you know that for sure”. For most of us however love has not been the answer.
On the one hand, the most potent remaining shared value in the world is love. Music is the universal language. Our deepest yearning, our implicit values and our most naked desire appears in our songs. It is surely significant then, that the overwhelming number of songs in the history of modern music, are love songs. This is true in virtually every language and every culture. Usually it is the amorous love of human beloved. But it might also be love of country, nature, God family or friend. It might be about love betrayed, love yearned or love fulfilled. But it is virtually always about love. The same Beatles sang to us, “All you need is love.” But if love is our final frontier we have crossed it and found it wanting. We have raced the great race of love, crossed the finished line and found ourselves, frustrated, hurt or bitter when love had gone bad. But even more significant, we have found ourselves still empty, lost and lonely even when our human loves have gone pretty well. The problem is not merely the failure of so many of us to realize love. The much larger challenge is that even those of us who feel like we have found love, have also found love wanting. Love does not seem to deliver on its promise. Yes there is a short period of time when we are in love and even write occasional love letters. But this time of bliss is short lived. We are virtually always exiled from Eden and rarely know how to find our way back to the fleeting paradise of yesteryear.
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In a recent Blog-Post “Waking Up to a New Love Story” on HuffPost The Third Metric Marc Gafni wrote:
We need a new story. A new cosmos story. A new waking up story. We need to know once again and beyond anything we ever knew that the universe is a love story. Not an ordinary love story, an Outrageous Love story. We live in a world of outrageous pain. The only response to outrageous pain is Outrageous Love.
The Looks and Feel of a Board Meeting
How this outrageous love story looks and feels like we could all witness and be part of at our annual CIW Board Meeting that took place in Texas at Co-Board Chair John Mackey’s ranch.
Read more about the board meeting 2015 and view pictures and media here>>>
