I've had love on the brain lately, intensely so. The trick, of course, is to bring it into the body, but this turns out to be more difficult - and I'm guessing a whole lot more rare - than one would hope.
This ongoing period of contemplation was forced on me by a series of inner promptings over months and months and months (I'm slow) - at first like passing strands of smoke, then whispers... once a "voice" at the back of my neck... then drumbeats... eventually shouting.
Without enumerating, I take the collective message to be this: Love. Silence. Love. Silence. Love. Silence. Go deeper into these. Become these.
(Well, okee-dokee then. Sure. I'll get right on it. Comin' right up.)
During this period of so many message meteors landing in my very personal terrain, I kept remembering two stories.
One was a brunch get-together with a girlfriend at my friend Sandro's bistro. It was a sunny morning and we were seated, warm and cozy, at a small table in the front window. My friend had recently pulled up stakes and moved 2000 miles to San Francisco. By pulled up stakes, I mean this: sold most of what she owned, walked away from a 30-year business with her name on it, in order to be closer to the hub of a spiritual group she had joined some years before. The friends she left behind would often refer to the group as a "cult" when she was out of earshot, but I never got that sense of it. It was certainly no more a cult than the Catholic Church is that for a house full of nuns. Still, I didn't know much, except that there was some kind of main teacher - a woman as I recall; they all practiced a form of meditation; and some lived in communities, sharing houses. Frankly, the group didn't interest me. What interested me was my friend's journey, which is how - sitting there in that bright, welcoming window - I came to ask, "What is the hunger? What is it you desire through this discipline."
Our food had just arrived. As with everything Sandro served, it was beautiful to behold. I was still appreciating her bowl of polenta and my fruit salad when she replied without pause, "I don't want to come back."
"Say again?"
"I don't want to come back. I don't want to be born again."
Boom. My head was up and looking into her face.
I have many friends who believe in reincarnation, who practice meditation in pursuit of everything from greater daily calm to full-bore enlightenment and I have heard them discuss their desires for spiritual growth in myriad ways, but no one had ever said it like this. Life: I want out of it. Let me out! Please don't make me do this again. Worse was how she looked in saying it: like the saddest, sorriest sack of gray surrounded by a golden morning radiance that could not penetrate. Oil. Water. She had not made a poor choice of words, she had said exactly what she wanted and her entire body and aura vibrated to the absolute truth of her inability to love her life.
It was one of those moments when I start wondering about my face. How much is showing right now? Because suddenly I could feel the enormity of my old friend's lifelong depression in ways that I had missed before. While my love and concern deepened considerably from that transaction and the exchange that followed, it is also true that our shared universe shifted on its axis. I never looked at her the same way again, never saw in her behavior the same things.
More, the conversation has continued to haunt me, causing me to wonder how much human striving is more about "away from misery" than "toward love." More "let me out" than "let me in." Which always brings me to this: "Surely the love path is more... conducive... to progress than the other." And yet...
The other story is one an ally of mine tells. Decades ago, she was lying on a massage table, resting alone after some kind of treatment, when she heard a voice - "You asked for this!" - then felt a bolt of overwhelming energy permeate her entire body, causing her to lurch and the room to rattle - objects actually fell to the floor. "Somehow, I knew," she said, "that what I was feeling was Divine Love, but it was not anything like what we humans call love - and I was so frightened that I shut it down. I regretted it immediately, of course. But it was too late. Still, those fleeting seconds altered my life's course."
So it is that my current bumpety-bump efforts (trust me: jalopy with bad tires on rocky road is an apt metaphor) to tap some deeper essence of love, these two stories refine my focus:
Please let this teach me how to love this gift of life I have been given in proper measure
Let my heart open to love that transcends human emotion.
I recently heard someone describe contemplation as "like sitting in a pitch black space, turning a little velvet ring box over and over in your hands, until suddenly your fingernail catches in the groove that flips it open and you come to discover the sparkling gem inside." For me, this call to a deeper awareness of love is purely contemplation right now
...not running from the dark
...rolling it around
...noting what bubbles up
...being quiet with it
...waiting for the thing that has called me to reveal itself
In the process, if someone were to ask, "What is it you desire through this discipline?", I would tell them, "Not knowledge, but embodiment. Please let me experience the living vibration of Divine Love for the part of me that It is."
Not so much to ask, eh?