Rock the Cosmic Rhythms of Your Heart

Rock to the cosmic rhythms of your heart
throbbing heat
quaking limbs
and sweat.

Feel the primal incandescence
in you 
owning you
blood red and blooming.

Savour the invisible 
essential
resonant
feeling-everything
full-wet-to-the-rim of it.

Lie still and listen.

Rock to the cosmic rhythms of your heart.

Be the Love you were meant to be in the world.

Love's Fallible Gods

“To fall in love is to create a religion that has a fallible god.” –Jorge Luis Borges

When I saw this quote it spoke the truth so clearly that I had to share it, particularly as Valentine’s Day is upon us.

I view Valentine’s Day with a degree of skepticism for the fact that it is among the most saccharine of all the holidays in our calendar year and, therefore, the one that holds the most potential for leading us down the garden path to disillusion and disappointment.

I am not against the idea of people celebrating a genuine love for each other on this day, but the fact that love in modern society is often conceptualized as a one dimensional, too pink, fluffy and soft sort of entity. Love has two sides, a light and a dark, just like everything else.

If we do not honour the dark as well as the light in love, we end up with expectations that reality cannot sustain. To be human is to be fallible and any legitimate concept of love must acknowledge and embrace this if it is to be real.

Our partners will be eternally grateful to us for taking them off the pedestal we often place them on. For this mental shift has the potential to deepen our experience of love, to give it roots and greater stability than more sentimental notions of it can bear.

Sentimentality has its place of course, but it needs to be enjoyed knowing that love is not confined to warm, tender feelings.

Love is only love in my opinion if it is robust, if it is unconditional and has a liberating effect. Which is to say, that love should have the best interests of all in mind and lead to psychological warmth, even as it may challenge our personal worldview, make us uncomfortable and force us to grow in ways we habitually avoid out of fear.

I guess what I am saying is that love is more complex and multi-dimensional than this pink and red-hearted holiday really allows for, and that living in ignorance of this reality is wildly problematic.

Falling in love is fun, it feels good, but turning that experience into a religion of sorts, by likewise turning our lover into an object of worship, is playing Russian Roulette with the heart—a course of action that most often does not end well.

So love with awareness. Love enough to let go of any self-interested, subterranean agendas and just let it be a gift.

And remember, this is a gift we need to confer on ourselves, not just those surrounding us.

Love passionately. Live deeply. Be real.

Love's Intelligence

“Love does not need to be understood. It only needs to be shown.” –Paulo Coelho

I once asked my teenage son how he would define love and he came up with a surprisingly simple definition—to care. I wasn’t expecting such a straightforward, uncomplicated answer and I was also not expecting him to define it in terms of a verb. But he's right.

It seemed to me, as I thought about it further, that we unnecessarily complicate what it means to love. As Coelho points out in the quote above, it is simply important to love, not necessarily to understand love. Trying to wrap our minds around love is like trying to wrap our minds around the mysteries of the universe—too deep, too vast.

Nevertheless I have to confess that trying to understand what love is has been something of a passionate pastime. When I asked my son for his definition I was expecting a philosophical answer. 

But at the end of the day all the sophisticated analysis of what love is, all the understanding of it, may be just a clever way to distract ourselves from the act of loving.

The willingness and ability to demonstrate care, to actually give a shit, to show that it matters how we treat each other, gets to the core of love’s intelligence—easing suffering and promoting peace and wellbeing. And this is always more challenging than we’d like it to be.

We are happy to love when we are assured of reciprocity, when it is easy and undemanding, but that sort of love is generally shallow and unstable. As soon as we are tested by someone’s cranky mood, verbal assault or failure to love in return, then we find out both what their love and our love is made of. And too often it is flimsy and insubstantial.

I vote that we all endeavour to be a little more courageous and intelligent in our approach to loving, and we can begin by deepening our ability to treat our own life and self like they matter and are worthy of our care.

Then we can better love those around us, no strings attached, no expectation of reciprocity, no demands. For love frees people. It doesn’t confine and oppress.

Bear in mind that this does not confer saint hood. If we are vying for status as some version of a saint, then we are not loving, we are just playing games and using other people.

Love isn’t some romantic head-trip. Neither is it confined to the soft, warm, tender feelings which characterize sentimentality.

Love is more pragmatic and intelligent than that, I think. 

Perhaps, at the very least, it simply means caring enough about other people to do them no harm. 

The Sane Way to Forgiveness

“You don’t forgive. Rather, forgiveness arrives when you’ve sorted things out and your heart is prepared and sufficiently open.” –Thomas Moore

I mentioned forgiveness in my last post and thought that this tweet of Thomas Moore’s got to the heart of things.

I personally have never had much luck forcing the issue of forgiveness and, at times, have been my own harshest critic for lacking the ability. 

It seems that forgiveness is something that evolves and makes its presence known when our hearts are done incubating and we sense it is time to move on.

For me this has historically been a frustratingly slow process. I want instant gratification! I desire peace now, but truly forgiving is something that takes as long as it takes.

Now that I understand forgiveness as a process I am less hard on myself and have taken a new tack, which is to allow the presence of all those difficult emotions I would rather not face. I simply let myself feel them and do nothing.

Somehow this is cathartic and takes me further in the direction of peaceful co-existence with others, than getting lost in righteous indignation does.

I don’t have all the answers. It is up to each of us to find our own way, but I think that Moore’s point is an apt one.

I think forgiveness happens to us when we soften enough inside to let love and understanding do their work on us.

Then its presence blossoms. 

It is an act of grace.