IF YOU’VE BEEN READING MY POSTS, YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED a recurring theme beginning to appear with some frequency. That theme recently crystalized in my mind as a short, declarative sentence: Love is the answer.
Until this morning, I “knew” the sentence was one that came to me some nine years ago as I woke up from a dream with a snippet of melody singing in my head. That piece of a dream song stayed with me, vividly, for a few months until I finally wrote down both the melody and its lyric, safely storing the fragment to be worked on later.
So, I was rather surprised yesterday afternoon, when I opened the sheet-music file and found the sentence now in my head actually wasn’t a line from the dream song. The title I’d given the dream song was “Love Is the Reason” — and the lyric was “Love is the reason for all we do. Love is the reason for life.”
How did “love is the reason” become “love is the answer”? And why? Both questions point toward mystery. Yes, a psychological answer to the how question would say an ongoing process of unconscious elaboration was at work on the initial dream image. All that says, however, is that some unknown process had been underway. In other words, something mysteriously happened to the original dream fragment.
Why did this unconscious creative process work on this dream song? I guess, something or someone hidden in the unknown depths of my psyche (or maybe the psyche) felt it was time to expand the initial fragment. In any case, the original lyric now has a second line: “Love is the answer to all we ask. Love is the answer we seek.” (Oddly enough, nine years ago, I wrote out the melody with a repeat, as if I “knew” a second line of lyrics would be coming, someday.)
When I sat down to write this post, I intended to address the question implied by what I thought was the dream statement: If love is the answer, what is the question? The actual dream declaration, that love is the reason, implies the question in the background is WHY? But what a troublesome question that is, each answer leading so often to a repeat of the question.
So, the new statement about love seems, somehow, to be a more productive form of the initial one — not logically more productive, of course, but perhaps poetically. In my next post, I’ll share some answers that rose up when I sat a while asking, If love is the answer, what is the question? Today, however, it feels better to simply sit with a dream-song fragment that now has two lines:
Love is the reason for all we do. Love is the reason for life.
Love is the answer to all we ask. Love is the answer we seek.
Thank you for reading my blog. If you enjoyed this post or found it insightful, please share it with your friends. And feel free to invite them to follow the blog, too. Oh, and while you’re at it, why not check out my book, Moonlight Shines in the Darkness, a Jungian study of Jesus and the feminine in the Gospel of John.
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