Marriage is not a Love Affair

Found these passages meaningful...



CAMPBELL: ... But marriage is marriage, you know. Marriage is not a love affair. A love affair is a totally different thing. A marriage is a commitment to that which you are. That person is literally your other half. And you and the other are one. A love affair isn't that. That is a relationship for pleasure, and when it gets to be unpleasurable, it's off. But a marriage is a life commitment, and a life commitment means the prime concern of your life. If marriage is not the prime concern, you're not married.

MOYERS: Does romance in marriage last?

CAMPBELL: In some marriages, it does. In others, it doesn't. But the problem, you see, the big word in this troubadour tradition, is "loyalty."

MOYERS: What do you mean by loyalty?

CAMPBELL: Not cheating, not defecting -- through whatever trials or suffering, you remain true.

MOYERS: The Puritans called marriage "the little church within the Church."In marriage, every day you love, and every day you forgive. It is an ongoing sacrament -- love and forgiveness.

CAMPBELL: Well, the real word, I think, is "ordeal," in its proper sense. That is the submission of the individual to something superior to itself. The real life of a marriage or of a true love affair is in the relationship, which is where you are, too. You understand what I mean?

MOYERS: No, I'm not clear on that.

CAMPBELL: Like the yin/yang symbol, you see. Here I am, and here she is, and here we are. Now when I have to make a sacrifice, I'm not sacrificing to her, I'm sacrificing to the relationship. Resentment against the other one is wrongly placed. Life is in the relationship, that's where your life now is. That's what a marriage is -- whereas, in a love affair, you have two lives in a more or less successful relationship to each other for a certain length of time, as long as it seems agreeable.

from The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell
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The Bird with the Beautiful Song

Recall to mind the 3rd Rupture: Man-Creation. Let me share a wonderful myth that specifically deals with this common human theme - from The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell pp. 76-77

MOYERS: Of course, we moderns are stripping the world of its natural revelations, of nature itself.

I think of that pygmy legend of the little boy who finds the bird with the beautiful song in the forest and brings it home.

CAMPBELL: He asks his father to bring food for the bird, and the father doesn't want to feed a mere bird, so he kills it.

And the legend says the man killed the bird, and with the bird he killed the song, and with the song, himself.

He dropped dead, completely dead, and was dead forever. 
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Personal Reflection:

Our exile is not a place. It is a time.

Nature is asleep to our identity. The newness of the earth await our return from a time.

We do not need to fight against nature. We need to tame ourselves first and awaken to nature that we may effectively harmonize with the life of the earth.

It is us who need to awaken.

We need to reconnect with nature in ourselves and say peace unto the wilderness, the mountains, the plains, the rivers, the lakes, the seas and the skies and all the life therein.

That we may find once again in ourselves through our nationhood the freedom to make friends - and appreciate with strength of understanding - the bird with the beautiful song.

Nature is a Filipino national value.