Love and Hate . . .
Love and hate cannot hold the same space at the same time. We either express love and compassion or abdicate to hatred which is a subset of fear. We end up calibrating at a much lower energy level. It’s amazing how hate leads to the most atrocious behavior in people who claim to be advocates of love—from war to toxic email exchanges; from vitriolic language toward someone they don’t even know to other forms of microaggression — how can that be? Such behavior is inconsistent with love.
The shift to love requires a total change in vision. Looking through a clear glass right-side up takes practice and fortitude. It requires not allowing ourselves to be distracted by lower energy or any other narrative but our own discerned experience of life and God and goodness. In the pause, the essence of love raises us to a higher vibration. It is that which we are always striving toward. This kind of love comes out of our deepest selves—the joys and the sorrows. Perhaps that is why Anne Morrow Lindbergh would say:
I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable.
This line of thinking has caused me to ponder what else is abdicated through a lack of LOVE. Characteristics like vulnerability and openness come to mind. I know vulnerability is not my most comfortable state of being. However, when I allow myself to briefly step into the possibility of something unknown, a new experience opens up. It is feels like freedom and is accompanied with joy, laughter, and self-expression. There is always a giving and receiving that initially springs from inside us without having to be sanctioned from outward approval systems.
A week ago I participated in an eco-grief workshop. I was unfamiliar with any of the other participants. The common cause brought us together in spite of our different backgrounds. The participants were introduced to Joanna Macy’s ‘Spiral That Reconnects.’ It’s a beautiful practice that begins with gratitude; then flows into pain that is honored through compassion where we suffer within ourselves and with the universe which leads to seeing differently through the eyes of the ancients; and finally we emerge to move onward to step into action with our own wisdom and that of others. It’s a reassuring journey that meets up again with gratitude. We just keep going around and around: expressing gratitude, mourning, renewing, taking action.
After the workshop I felt my heart soften and my breath slow down. I was reminded of my own practice of journaling, sometimes adding a mandala to a page I want to reference later. I never really thought about it, not only does it make my journaling more colorful, but I turn to those pages more frequently for deeper reflection. That practice animates my soul just like the eco-grief workshop. The spiral that reconnects is art. Journaling is art. Life is art if we allow it to be so.
Some days we may not feel that we are creating anything of any relevance but with a contemplation the truth of a particular moment starts to reveal itself. Whether our art includes sitting with the homeless woman in-residence under loblolly trees, or paying the change that someone didn’t have at a check-out counter, or conversing with the trees in the morning. It’s all art and represents the impersonal love that penetrates life. It doesn’t need to be broadcasted because the cosmos flows through the interconnection that places us where we need to be— and that is LOVE.
We are taught to look at only the surface and we end of seeing life in fragments, separated from our centers, and focusing on how we are different from other people, other cultures, nature. But we are not! Words like entitlement, domination and power proliferate in this culture and interfere with our vulnerability and deepest sensibilities. This insight from Willie Nelson speaks to an awakening that we can all embrace.
We are all the same. There is no difference anywhere in the world. People are people. They laugh, cry, feel, and love, and music seems to be the commons denomination that brings us all together. Music cuts through all boundaries and goes right to the soul.
For many of us moments of vulnerability are taxing. We have to recognize those parts of ourselves that we keep hidden. The armor of aloofness, indifference or distancing from the unfamiliar. While I don’t always relish the unknown, I’ve come to really honor the gifts that it often brings—new friendships, a different perspective, refreshing ideas, and dialogue. But most precious of all is the experience of ultimate love.
That kind of freedom makes me want to dance and maybe you will want to dance, too.