I love your Invocation, Daniel. Here's something else I'd like to offer here because it deals again with unconditional love. I first wrote it for the thread, "Would you have last 20 years?"
Love is a Force of Nature!
The depth of those words may be lost because of simplicity of the statement. I believe that true love, the unconditional kind, when you surrender to it, when it takes hold of your entire being, isn't a choice as much as some people imagine. The choice is in the surrender to it, but then we embody it and it becomes a part of us, it becomes flesh, blood, memory, emotions, mind.
My experience of this love is that it isn't momentary; it isn't over in a few months or years, it last forever and if you know it, you know "a foretaste of heaven"... if there are such places in some afterlife.
Is that something a person can walk away from, not usually. Is it something a person will do almost anything to keep? Yes. Jack and Ennis both knew it.
Life is never just joy and pleasure; there's always some measure of suffering and discomfort one has to bear without a doubt and real love is one of the great mysteries of comfort, strength, power and pleasure that makes it worth the pain.
I identify with Jack strongly because I have been fortunate enough to have known real love in this life and I know what he was feeling. It can happen to you at any time in life and, I say again, we don't have as much control or power over "it" as it has over us.
Twenty years for a taste of eternity every month or so? Yeah, it's worth hanging out for that. Had Jack not met with the untimely end that he did, he would have met Ennis in November. I have little doubt of that... nor did Jack..."
Love,
Rayn