On the Nature of Love

If there was an Internet in those days, you couldn’t do much with it. Digital cameras were beyond the pocket, and mobile phones were not nearly so mobile or as smart as they are now. It was an entirely analogue expedition then, the first time I walked the Dale Head Round. Map, compass, and an eye to the weather was what we went by. It’s strange how the date is fuzzy now. I feel I should have a better fix on it, but 2001, 2002 is the best I can do. And it was summertime.

I set out from just below Little Town, in the Newlands Valley. I should clarify Little Town is not a town, more a collection of rural cottages and farm buildings. The valley is a sublimely beautiful place, remote, just the one narrow road, tall hedgerows, pastures and woodland on either side, and the fells rising steep all around.

Scope End was the first objective, a shapely cone of a hill, and a lovely thing to climb. Then it was the ridge to the summit of Hindscarth, and finally Dale Head, with its massive cairn. There was a girl, too. I'd found her resting by the cairn, as if waiting for someone to catch up. She smiled at my approach, seemed open, inviting of company. It stirred something in me, sent me tumbling down a void of years, all the way back to the teen years and memories of unrequited love. I returned the smile, but sensed a danger, either in her or me, so did not settle on the summit for long. Decades later, I wrote her into a novel and called her Jen.

The unrequited love of our teenage years seems an important step along the way. It's a stirring of the archetype, a recognition of the thing that is missing in us, and without which we feel we shall never be complete. It is the memory of a connection we each once possessed, but from which all details but the scalding essence of the feeling itself have been removed.

It was peculiar this should be catching up with me again, a guy who had begun the downhill into his forties. But this was a desire for connection, more in the metaphysical sense. I had simply mapped it onto the form of a kindly young stranger.

From Dale Head, it’s a long descent to a reedy tarn, then another climb onto High Spy and Maiden Moor. After that, when you reach the foot of Cat Bells, the route branches off to the west and descends once more, bringing you safely back to Little Town. Finally, there's a short section of that narrow road. It had been a long day, and I was pleasantly tired, satisfied at having completed the route, but still haunted by that encounter by the cairn – or at least by the peculiar way I'd reacted to it and the memories it had triggered.

Then I glanced up.

Scope End came into view.

And nothing was ever the same again.

My vagueness over the precise date I put down to the fact I attempted to suppress the memory of what happened next. But the inner self kept offering it back until I accepted it and dealt with it. Dealing with it has been a journey of many years, and by now the precise time, the precise year, is blurred.

But first I need to take you way back.

Imagine you’re very young, and you’re in love. And the person you love? They don’t even know your name. You hope they’ll notice you and love you back, for how can they not? Except they don’t.

I dreamed of her once, the one I loved. And in the dream she realised my love and told me how much she wanted to be with me. For a time, in dream-time and before I woke back to the unrequited reality, what I felt was euphoric, and I floated in it. It was the first time of such a profoundly stirring experience.

The second, and the last, was that day in the Newlands Valley.

One dream.

One reality.

If you’re a religious person, you might see the deities related to your faith. I’m not, and did not. I was secular, rational, shy of the word “spiritual”, aware it comes loaded with the potential for misinterpretation. Mystical is a better fit for me, though I resist even that. The metaphysical reality is mysterious, but that’s only because we do not understand it. All we get is a glimpse. But a glimpse is plenty, for thereafter it becomes your life’s work. More than a glimpse and I reckon you could easily go mad.

What happened was that Scope End and I were no longer separate. I was Scope End. Indeed, everywhere I looked, I was. For a time I pathologised it, told myself I had been on the verge of a faint, that consciousness had retreated into a hallucinatory reverie. And yet the feeling itself had been authentic: that my mind and what I had always taken to be material reality out there were, in some sense, the same.

For years I feared that accepting the experience meant accepting a kind of solipsism, a world populated only by projections of my own self. Yet the experience itself had never suggested that. Quite the opposite. It had suggested participation rather than isolation. No, we do not create our own reality. Reality creates us, right enough, and our fellow beings, and the universe itself. It’s just that reality may not be what we think it is.

But what has any of this to do with love?

The materialist reading of me will agree with that early diagnosis of a near loss of consciousness and a lapse into an hallucinatory state, and I do accept that as a possibility. However, I must remind them, and myself, a loss of consciousness does not tally with the fact I was walking along the road at the time, perfectly aware of myself – that I did not stumble, that the whole thing, timeless and expansive though it was, could only have lasted the time it takes to raise one’s foot, mid-stride, and put it down again.

Nor does it tally with the overwhelming feeling of love, the perfect love of completion, of consummation, of going home.

It was the love of the dream I had dreamed as a boy, the love that pours in when what is unrequited is, by some miracle, returned.

That said, I don’t know what love is, I mean as a thing in itself, only that in life we interpret it as the source of all meaning, and we will move mountains to attain it. It is the engine that drives us, as it drives everything else into being. I believe we each once knew this undifferentiated and non-dual state, but in life the limited apparatus of our biology does not permit its recollection. Thus we crave reunion with a mode of being we cannot be sure exists, yet nevertheless believe we shall find in the love we pursue and feel for others.

To experience the underlying nature of reality, however briefly or imperfectly, is to know the source.

It is to know love too, as the energy that creates the universe and all that is in it.

If we are lucky in life, we will fall in love, our love will be returned, and consummated in partnership, marriage, whatever. And then? Then we discover our partner is not divine. They are human, and they have their foibles, as do we. If we’re really lucky, they are easy to be with, we settle into their loving presence, and we can’t imagine ever wanting to be with anyone else.

And if we are luckier still, we are granted this insight that we also exist within a greater reality, in whose loving embrace we rest, no matter the ups and downs, the trials and tribulations of our waking lives.

This is the nature of love and being.

It’s the way it has always been.

We have simply forgotten it.