Love is the beating heart of the world. When we desire – when we attract or are attracted to a person, situation or thing – choices and their life-changing consequences await us.
Desire – that most ancient of gods – forces our destiny upon us. Eros is a god but also a sniveling child and a ravaging beast. His arrows of love charge us on a journey that opens us to our divinity (Beauty) and our animality (Beast), the ecstasy and the agony.
Eros and Psyche by Apuleius is a template of many of the great love stories in our western culture. It tells the dilemma of immortal Eros, that great life-force of desire falling in love with the human soul Psyche. It is she who must quest for her lover – she who carries the burden of this love. Their marriage rests on her capacity to complete seemingly impossible and overwhelming tasks.
The human Beauty has to learn to listen to her own beating heart and make choices that will reunite her with her Beast. The marriage between mortal and divine then results in the birth of a daughter called Voluptas - Pleasure.
My mother and father are the sweethearts on my Lovers Card.
Their love story is still as dynamic as it was in 1943. Their choices have had dramatic, tragic and fateful consequences that reverberate through our family’s successive generations.
As their eldest daughter, despite all the history – and maybe because of it – I willingly embrace the god’s designated name of Joy, as my own.