Thank you for posting this loverly poem-prayer to the beloved. I wish to introduce another way of seeing the yearning for the Soul Mate, a yearning that can sometimes -- not always -- act as a mask for the Courtship Compulsion. I only hope my post does not rain too hard on the lovefest here.

The Courtship Compulsion weakens the heart and wastes the imagination by an increasing emotional investment in an idealized image of the "dream lover" and its obsessive search for "The One", the "soulmate". The culture at large feeds and controls the Courtship Compulsion in many ways, from mass media promotions of The Beauty Myth that masks widespread oppression of the women and the men who fall for it, to the pre-fab promises that marriage brings eternal happiness. The Courtship Compulsion can also conceal a sophisticated sadomasochistic ritual of self-torment where love is always wanted but never truly found.

I think the spiritual root of the Courtship Compulsion dwells in the authentic yearning resulting from any serious loss of verticality; the greater the loss of vertical contact, the greater the yearning. Verticality, as in sources of energy.information streaming down from above and up from below n a vertical axis mediated by the spinal column. If we can restore personal communion with our vertical sources, this courtship compulsion transforms and is replaced by the experience of oneself as love. Love as true nature.

Realizing our true nature we can engage fully in romantic and longterm relations with others, not as any desperate search for love but, as an act of love itself in the sharing and offering of the self. The imagination, once previously projected and wasted on bleak and unattainable and self-tormenting fantasies, is now free to dream itself more fully from a fertile source of love. When nourished by such a foundation, Imagination flourishes and makes a home for the soul.