Archive for the ‘longing’ tag
Blue-Crowned MotMot
On a recent visit to the Dzibilchaltun Mayan ruins, I had the opportunity to photograph a few of these beautiful birds. This was my second siting of this type of bird here in Mexico. I had to chase this bird to finally get a decent shot with the camera. I guess it likes to play hard to get/catch. And, this makes me think of eros, romantic love, a passionate longing and desire. The Greeks called it theia mania, the divine madness (madness of the gods). In our modern world we talk of cupid’s arrows, love at first sight both of which when looked at closely are about loss of control to other. We become wounded. The tail of this motmot does give the impression of being fletched arrows ready to wound another with eros. In a small series of books (He, She, We and The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden), Robert A. Johnson looks at eros. In this last book, The Fisher King and the Handless Maiden, Robert notes:
“Where there is no terminology, there is no consciousness. A poverty-stricken vocabulary for any subject is an immediate admission that the subject is inferior or depreciated in that society. Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persian has eighty; Greek three; and English simply one. This is indicative of the poverty of awareness or emphasis that we give to that tremendously important realm of feeling. … Of all the Western languages, English may be the most lacking when it comes to feeling” (page 6)
No wonder we get confused in trying to define love. And without the words, we suffer.
