Intimacy

I've come down from my 2nd floor study to our 1st floor lounge dinning area to write this. I am sitting at the dinning table and DC (my partner) is sitting nearby writing Christmas cards. He's doing this now not because we're the well in advance type but because he is going to India for three and a half weeks on Wednesday. An Elvis Costello CD is playing, it's warm and cozy but the room is quite large and airy.

This will be his second visit to India. The first was two years ago and that was also for three and a half weeks. At that time it was the longest we had been apart since we got together in 1992; normally any separate trips we make are only about a week or so long. DC and I live shared and separate lives; ever changing areas of Being in overlap and interdependence. This is true I think for all Beings.

I checked a definition of intimacy on Wiktionary - 'feeling or atmosphere of closeness and openness toward someone else, not necessarily involving sexuality'

Ink and paper are intimate on the page, they don't refuse each other they are closely affecting each other, their forms mutually engaged. But they don't know it. As I see them I know them but not with great intimacy. This all points to some stuff I find interesting about 'reality' etc and ways of being in the world but just now I would rather stick with more important aspects of intimacy; people.

People can be intimate in various ways; intellectually(/professionally), emotionally, physically, erotically. I think most of the combinations and permutations are possible and to degrees we commonly fail to appreciate. Think of affection; again it has various varieties and these are coloured by intimacy involving the various elements above. We might at this stage consider love. I think romantic love to be a fiction, a mix of various factors including infatuation, co-dependency and Eros. There is the four fold model of love - Storge, Philia, Eros and Agape, I like this model and see it in the context of levels of intimacy in the various aspects of being; intellect, emotion and (proximity of) physical body. Again all these forms are mutually interdependent.

Eros is a strange mix of ideas and emotions and needs to be considered in the light of aesthetics (as opposed to ascetics). Just what is it that makes an object (any object not just those considered of Eros) attractive? Purity of form / adherence to an ideal - some deeply ingrained view ( held in genetics / the collective unconscious / some other model) of something true? A manifestation of the universe's need to be, to separate (yet always remaining whole) reflecting in a sense of worth? And in the separation the unattainable ideal existing, attractive just because it is always just out of reach? Probably something like that but karma and attachments are too complex to unpick through the eyes of various models in a blog.

Agape sheds light and generally brings things round to Philia. We had friends around for dinner last night, at this table in this room. All warmth and good cheer and a bit of good hearted teasing for fun.