Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation.
Kahlil Gibran
Toward the end of my stay in the Highlands, a darkness fell over Anne and me. We always continued our routines of work and play. Our intimacy was no longer a thought process but a subconscious way of life. We had conquered all the disorders that ruin a relationship except separation. Anne knew about the human suffering caused by separation; she had lived in its shadow all her life. Now, she was faced with it again.
I was naive. I grew up taught that a man never shows pain or suffering. My whole reason for existence was to provide sustenance and security to a family I created. In return, I would demand respect. Love was never considered part of the equation. Yet, here I was, deeply in love with a woman who made no demands and did not need sustenance or security from me. It had been a blessed relief as I plunged headlong into the bonds of love shared equally.
Now, Anne was pulling away and turning inside herself into that peaceful sanctuary impenetrable by the outside world and the cycles of samsara. When we made love, she was submissive to give pleasure; when she took the active role, she was giving pleasure to smooth the rugged edges of my testosterone and ego. She could not hide from my intuitive power as I sensed she was no longer present, even when her body succumbed to orgasm and the fog of closeness and sweet words. I turned this protective nature of Anne’s into a powerful self-loathing. I lost my sense of self.
What took me decades to learn was that Anne had burned the last ounce of falsehood from my life and left me pure and unadulterated so that life could fill me with a genuine inner world like hers, peaceful and accepting. It’s hard to explain that my life’s journey came to a crossroads, and Anne pointed to the right road. The most magnificent lives are those deeply scarred by life’s battles who emerge in later life as guides to accompany the young and terrified. All other lesser souls had perished long ago.
In this battle of life and death, the one constant is loss. We must say goodbye, and the nature of departure is as varied as the sand grains filling the Saharan Desert. Our salvation is only through love in its purest form. My transformation took time and effort. I barely escaped with my life.
A few benchmarks capture the necessary cycles of humanity and its horrible history that remain relatively constant today. We have reached the 10 billion mark, and universally, we are staring human disaster directly in the face. We have turned to spend our limited time in discordant ways, always intending to execute cross-purposes and force our delusions on those around us. Sadly, it is all for nothing.
According to the latest figures from 2021, there are 19 births per 1000 people. We know that love has nothing to do with that statistic, although love and partnership with the intent to raise children are always present.
The global death rate, all causes, was 8 per 1000 in the same period, 2021. The population is growing at 11 per 1000 annually. If my math is correct, that’s 110 million kids per year. In 4 years, that’s the total population of America.
To get to that net gain, we need sexually active relationships. If we allow unwanted or accidental pregnancy, childbirth is essentially a sperm meets egg transaction, whether love had anything to do with it.
eHarmony conducted a study in 2017 that showed, on average, Americans had three romantic relationships throughout their lives. Relationships are not considered body count. Sexual experiences did not constitute a relationship, although what defines a relationship is subjective. There is truth in the third try is the charm.
Now, let’s fantasize a little further. From one of those three romantic relationships, marriages occur. Globally, the marriage rate is at 5 per 1000, according to the UN and World Bank.
According to the UN, the following fact staring at us from across the bedroom is the divorce rate at 1.1 per 1000.
I’ll do some statistical magic in later posts to show how these statistics are interrelated and what they mean to us as a species. The important thing is these are normalized figures to make them universally applicable. Normalization is the most accurate way to compare a statistic across a hugely variant population. An example is Divorce in America, which holds at about 50% over six decades, even as the population doubled. But there are zero divorces in the Philippines because they aren’t allowed. One can request an annulment, but the average time from request to granted annulment is ten years. People leave one marriage and enter into cohabitation with another, and there are no statistics on the quantity of this practice.
It’s important to remember that these are subjective benchmarks where the definition varies from society and location across the globe. But they serve to tell us that the Human population enters into relationships, many marry, many have children, many divorce, and we all die when our time comes. Given that, why not learn to make it count?
When I finally left Anne in her Garden of Light, she allowed herself to show me through her tears and deep sobbing in my arms that we mattered and that there was love and deep emotional attachment. And now, the Garden experiment would become her way of life. She had succeeded, and our lives would never be the same.
Hyperion Sky 
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