Love, as I see it
For me it was love.
In the closing circle at the end of the retreat, we asked everyone to share what stood out to them and what they’d be leaving with.
I felt it, love, in a way I hadn’t before. It had no edges, no ceiling, no form. It coursed through me, unfiltered.
·
It was a silent act – I loved in my thoughts and touch and gazes. When everyone lay down in savasana, surrendering heart to sky, all of us taking one final breath in unison, I felt a greater intelligence blanket over my being.
It filled the room and entered me, and I became the gatekeeper to these resting souls. Wrapping my arms around that responsibility, easily – that was love.
·
In the days after, my hand clutches my chest like at any moment my heart could tumble out onto the sidewalk. I feel raw, unclad, like a baby chick just hatched.
·
Love is nothing differentiating the beings in front of me, standing, moving, sitting, lying. In the relative realm, we differ: in age, gender, sexuality, race, income, ability. In that other realm – the absolute – we are, they are, light and goodness.
·
Love is making contact with bodies. Noticing with precision the undulations of breath that shift my hands up an inch, down an inch.
·
As I harden my shell to brace the complexity of modern life, I ask: Why? How?
Why so easy to love, be loved, and be love itself? What are the conditions that usher these states in?
·
We let what wanted to arise, arise. We respected the organic unfolding and danced with it instead of moulding, shaping, funnelling.
·
Each time we gathered we struck the singing bowl, shared a few breaths, arrived.
How often do we get to luxuriate in this minutia of arrival? In normal life we enter a space, and the thing begins. Where is the ceremony? The invitation to tune in before out? The marking of transition between two spaces, two disparate feelings?
·
My role on retreat: Be love itself, and litter myself onto people’s paths.
·
In my younger days I drank myself into a haze so I could override un-safety and non-rightness to get a taste of ‘love’.
I flung myself into the night and the arms of strangers. It worked in the slightest way; tiny hits of unity in dribs and drabs.
I got lost, down the dark paths of looking in the crooks and crannies of the psyches of unfamiliar men, for love. Then I had no choice but to revolutionise the project.
·
This is what it feels like. I know now. How to draw light and warmth and awe from within, pull at them softly from this deep, bottomless, wellspring of my beingness.
On top, yes, is the sludge of conditioning that tells me what’s loveable and what’s not, but underneath is the pure unmistakable pool of unconditional love.
I’m falling right in.