Tag: Love

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Choosing the Stance of Love

During my short ride on this planet, I want my efforts to add weight to the sum of goodness. At the deepest bedrock, I sense that life is more than a competition for possessions and comforts that feather my nest at the expense of others, that I am here to help shape a world that is better for my having walked here. I want my basic orientation to be one of service, helping, and healing. I would call it a stance of love. I am not alone. Most people share this desire, want to know they are contributing to something bigger. The drive to foster love is a human fundamental.

I feel momentum behind this stance, a wind at my back. It is more than an accumulation of separate people, however numerous, making individual moral choices. Taking a stance of love seems to align with forces flowing through the fabric of existence, like the gravity that pulls the planets through the heavens. Every act that furthers love is rowing with the current; every act in opposition struggles against the waves.

How do I know this? I take a reading from my internal compass. When I give or receive a kindness, I feel the flow, a palpable warmth surging through me. Conversely, I recoil from unkindness. My compass recognizes what is alien, a foreign body my spiritual immune system must reject.

But what about that other human fundamental, the drive for survival that runs on fear and warps our minds? In its more distorted phase, we could call it evil. Here is the sticky point, the question I cannot answer: if the cosmos is built on an architecture of love, why does cruelty seem to flourish? How can weeds of poison, noxious and rotting, grow from a soil meant to flower? I want to believe in the underlying stream of empathy, compassion, and care that calls to me. But I am enraged and repelled by heartless acts of brutality, war, and genocide, suffering at a level that pierces my soul and leaves me bleeding. How can I act with love toward those engaged in greed and power? What does loving action look like in the face of evil? To do nothing seems weak, an act of apathy or acquiescence. The anger in me wants to meet fire with fire, but I know if I pick up a hammer forged in that furnace, it will burn me. The flames will only grow.

Over the years, I’ve learned I can’t argue myself into an answer with these impossible questions. The process is not mental. Thinking just spins me in place, screwing me deeper into nowhere. I have to call upon a different faculty to suss it out. As best as I can fathom, a stance of love requires meeting the world with an open heart. Not a metaphor, but an actual feeling of warmth and receptivity in the center of my chest. Curious. Alive. It is wicked-hard to remain there when I want to scream or cry. So I scream or cry, but stay as open as I can. As I do, the warmth gets stronger, fresh insights offer up.

My choices are always wiser when my heart is open. At a local scale, people around me can sense that I am loving, not hateful, and the chance for something new increases. At a global scale, I hope my small opening widens in the stream, gathering with others, adding to the flow. If we are connected in the ways that I believe, then I have done my part by dampening the flames, not stoking them.

Am I right? How can I be sure I’m not placating my fears with pleasant dreams about a universe that is loving at its core? More questions to which I have no answer, but I’m not sure I need one. I’m willing to allow an open heart to be my guide because it’s working.

Photo by Vladislav Babienko on Unsplash

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How Many Words for Love? 

How many words have we used to illuminate this indefinable idea, the desire we never exhaust, the experience we can never say enough about, the word beneath all other words, as if it refused to be another item on our wish list, but was the paper our lists are written on? It lies at the root of all our motivations, carries our longings, sustains us in absence or abundance, meets us in any circumstance, uplifting or depressing.

Our expectations are unreasonable for this small, soft syllable, and yet it holds up well. However incomplete the language, I want to understand the many words for love.

Appreciation, seeing the qualities in another I most want to see in myself.

Forbearance, holding my tongue when words would cut, even when I have the right.

Yearning, the slow, aching wish that orbits but cannot land.

Care, sensing needs before they are spoken.

Enchantment, seeing the color in gray clouds.

Forgiveness, the gift I’m afraid to ask for, the salve I withhold until I’m ready for repair.

Bearing pain, my carrying capacity for burdens.

Exuberance, the shameless joy that overspills, laughing and giddy.

Sacrifice, giving away what is most precious.

Discipline, the patience to wait and trust that seeds can bloom.

Grief, the water seeping under the door I had shut to hold it out.

Darkness, the cold unending absence I endure.

Despair, the proof that I still care.

Self-regard, choosing to believe the voice that treasures me, not the voice that disparages me.

Protest, refusal to accept the things that drag us backwards.

Presence, lavishing attention with such outrageous availability that we are mirrored in each other.

Smile, the small gesture that opens doors.  

Touch, pure connection, wordless and warm.

If these words are scattered bits of color turning in the cosmic kaleidoscope, what is the light they are aimed toward? I think it must be some form of this: I hold the interests of another equal to my own; I recognize that the exchange between us, the giving and receiving of love, is the fundamental purpose of being human. The crowd of words continues, vanishing in the distance, but none of them can escape the gravity of that first word. No healing comes outside of its embrace.

Photo by Felicia Montenegro on Unsplash

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Fighting Evil Without Hatred

I carry my judgments like stones, heavy in my pocket. They have the appearance of being trustworthy, solid as anchors, but their rigidity does not breathe. I know they harm me more than help me, but I find it hard to lay them aside. If I continue to collect them, they will drown me.

Making judgments is embedded in the way I learn about the world. I’m constantly discerning, evaluating, and making choices based on my past experiences. I learn what works and what doesn’t, what is right and what is wrong, and those lessons condition how I respond to people and events. But judgment adds an unnecessary step, assigning a moral conclusion that something is inherently good or bad. When I arrive at a judgment, my process of discerning and evaluation collapses into a simple fixed declaration.

I hold my judgments dearly. To reconsider them means my opinions and choices may have been wrong. Actions I took, pain I caused, may have been misguided. Fervent defense of my judgments becomes an exercise in self-justification. If others are bad, I am good when I oppose them. But if my judgments about others are misplaced, wholly or partly untrue, then where am I on the scale of goodness?

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The Two Roots – Awareness and Love

The physical world rests upon a substrate, base components at the fundamental layer of existence. Electrons, protons, and neutrons swirl in a dance of atoms, combining to make hydrogen, helium, carbon, oxygen, iron, water, air, soil, and everything else. All that we can see or touch derives from these basic building blocks.

The metaphysical world rests upon a substrate too. At the fundamental layer are the irreducible forces of awareness and love, the base components from which everything derives. All that we can hope for in a spiritual life sprouts from this double helix.

Appearance, sensation, perception, attention, thought, reflection, insight, ideas – none of these are possible without the faculty of awareness. Its absence cannot even be described as a dark void, because darkness and emptiness can be sensed, and without sentience, there is nothing. Simply and completely nothing. Awareness makes the vibrancy of life accessible.

Empathy, compassion, affection, friendship, fellowship, community, generosity, mercy, union – these are the shades of love that give meaning to what arises in awareness; its absence would reduce sentience to the dry and motionless act of observance. Love makes the experience of life worthwhile.

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Walking Each Other Home

“We’re all just walking each other home.”

Ram Dass

Ram Dass describes life as a walk. That image feels right. It’s a terrain I learn about by moving though. There are easy stretches where fields explode with flowering brush and insects buzzing in the sunshine. There are rough patches where soaking rains have washed away the trail. The distant hills might slope gently, convincing me I have the strength to meet them, before turning into mountain cliffs that seem to want to break me. It’s all there for me to learn from as I go. I pray the joys outweigh the woes, but I know, whatever comes, I am stronger for the walking.

And it’s true, my walk is leading somewhere; I am walking home. I’m trying to find my way through the wood, guided by the lessons I’ve been given. My learning has not always been pretty. I’ve made mistakes that hurt people, as many times as I’ve been hurt. But when the lesson took, I advanced another step, my inner goodness brightened, and my actions from that point were better.

Isn’t that how we all proceed along this road, learning, laughing, cringing, crying, finding our way through the flowers and the mud? We’re all trying to figure out how to make it through with a minimum of harm, under motivations we only partly understand, all of us wanting, desperately, to feel love, and trying stunningly stupid ways to find it.

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Politics, Awareness, and Love

I want to be more loving. To be more forgiving, big-hearted, generous of spirit. When I touch this side of myself, it feels good to the bone and reminds me that I fulfill something fundamental when I act from The Well at the center of my being. But in our current political times, I feel a darkness seeping into me, and The Well can seem far away, dry, exhausted. Maybe even poisoned.

Politics. A word fraught.

In one sense, politics can mean the structure and policies of our government. But in a larger sense, it’s also how we organize society, the collection of choices we make as we thrash out the messy details of how we differ and agree. We are shaped both by the decisions we make and how we make them. Each small choice along the way fills The Well or depletes it. Together, they tell the story of who we are as a people.

The choices we have seen in recent years have left many of us horrified, appalled, heartbroken. The shape that is emerging is grotesque, and the story it tells about us is shameful. I recoil when I realize the road we are on seems headed for more of the same in the coming years.

I don’t often write about politics. Stumbling Mystic is devoted to a different, parallel track of the human project. I write to understand the call of an impulse that moves me toward The Well, pulls me to the center where my goodness blooms, and reminds me that a bloom of goodness rests in the potential of every person. I worry that writing about politics will diminish this devotion. Political views today have become adamant, vehement, like blocks of pre-cast concrete. To talk about politics arouses stale arguments that enflame without enlightening, switching the track of conversation to an empty siding that can go nowhere.

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My Dad Is Telling a Story

My dad is telling a story

I feel a quiet joy in sitting with my dad today. On many days, he mostly sleeps, and my visits are a reminder of his continuing decline. But today, he is talkative and deeply engaged in telling me a story from his past.

What he is talking about is not clear. Parts of it sound like a story I have heard him tell about how, as a young man, he would help an uncle gather his small dairy herd for milking. It’s hard to follow the thread. Dad’s words are sometimes garbled, his train of thought is broken into pieces that don’t connect. His phrases repeat or trail off into soft sounds. If I ask a question, it’s too much for his brain to process. He looks at me blankly, my question floats past, and he returns to telling the story.

There is, of course, great sadness as I watch my father wander in his dementia. There is also acceptance that this is what the last phase of his life looks like, a life that was blessed in many ways. And there are also moments of warmth and connection, like today when he is awake and active. I have taken to cherishing these days. 

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Wise Words – By Our Love, Not By Our Thinking

By our love not by our thinking

“By our love the Sacred may be touched and held; by our thinking, never.”

The Cloud of Unknowing, Chapter 6

Thinking is not wrong, it just gets too much air time in our hyper-productive, over-stimulated society.

When applied to problems it is good at, its answers seem complete:  How many grams are in a cup? When is the next solar eclipse? How much weight can this bridge design hold? These are questions with definite answers, and logic is ideally suited to deliver them. This leaves the false impression that thinking is a superior pathway to understanding. 

But we humans are multi-dimensional. For all its usefulness, logic cannot reach the parts of life we hold most dear:  the waves of love we feel holding our newborn child or grandchild; the subtle smile in the eyes of our spouse or partner; intuitive bursts of creativity; an inspired refrain of Bob Dylan or Beethoven; the upswept majesty of entering a cathedral. These are sacred experiences and no logical explanation of them is complete or fulfilling. They need to be embraced by another dimension of our being.

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Wise Words – Your Most Important Spiritual Task: Opening Your Heart

“If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

C.S. Lewis

A sadness comes over me as I read these words and recognize the truth of it in me. Over the years, I have learned how to protect myself by armoring my heart.  

We all do, I suppose. Shortly after our birth, the world began to show us it can be a hurtful place. One moment, we felt a sense of union and safety with our parents, and the next, we felt the devastating ache of absence. So, we learned to shield ourselves from painful feelings by shutting off the heart. 

These preverbal lessons embedded themselves in the first layers of our psyche. And perhaps the most painful early scar was to adopt the false belief that somehow the fault must be in us, that we are not lovable. In various ways, we all share the early tragic misconception that we are not okay as we are.

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Wise Words – Love Is Metaphysical Gravity

“Love is metaphysical gravity.”

Buckminster Fuller

In the physical world, gravity holds everything together. It pulls the planets around the sun; grounds us to the earth; makes the rivers flow; moves the tides across the shore.

In the physical world, gravity is universal, an unseen force that acts on matter everywhere. The presence of one affects the whole.

Newton viewed the physical world as a collection of objects with gravity acting on each. Einstein proved that gravity is a field that holds everything together – matter, light, energy, even time, all move together in relationship within the curves of this field.

We don’t know why gravity exists. Maybe the best physicists can say is, “That’s just how the world works.”

What about beneath the physical? What holds the metaphysical world together?

Love.  

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