love

The nice young man I stayed with when I arrived in London, who had met me back in the States when there was still a “me” and invited me to work here, saw the rehearsals for our European tour. He admired our work and wished me well (He said, “break a leg,” but you know that’s what show people say). Then he said, "You’re a good dancer, not great, but good, passionate, emotional. Your technique is quite solid, you know your limitations and work well within them. It’s sad that you are such an anti-social little bitch!"

I think his heart was broken. There was no one here to love him back, and he hasn’t yet seen that he is love itself --- everyone and everything is --- and that he is never alone. I didn’t tell him that, I just gave him a hug. Oh, well, I really do love compliments on my technique and an honest appraisal of my dancing more than anything!

But really, this is not about being nice or not nice. I used to think I had to be the good girl, the nice, pretty one who always smiled even though she felt hurt, and was always polite. I even went on dates out of politeness, not to hurt a guy’s feelings. That Miranda is gone. Along with the illusion of anyone who could choose how to behave. This is simply being alive to aliveness, not being sensitive to others. Love is beyond acting one way or another. Love is unconditional, it’s the fire that burns everything and it’s the ashes dancing in the wild wind. It’s all of this, endlessly and never at all.

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This is a love affair with love itself. Everyone is my beloved; all the appearances of transient names and faces that flicker on the screen of dreams we call life, the only place we seem to exist. Everyone is made of love; everyone is love itself. There is nothing you can do that will ever take you outside of this dream of love. The story you tell about who you are or are not, the songs you sing, your suffering and hope, or the peaceful ease of bliss as you seem to dissolve into what simply is --- none of that separates you from the love that we are, none of that matters at all.

This is one love song that is not even one, simply undivided. Love is not personal, for there is no center to this love from which I can look out and see you as separate. No center from where I can feel anything for any separate appearance, including this Miranda character who is simply being lived, animated for a time like a leaf floating in a river. The movie plays on a flat screen, and yet it seems to have characters and objects that move about in three dimensions, and that is its magic, its divine expression, though there is no divinity behind it.

No longer is any apparent word or action seen as coming from any source, any character in the film. Life itself writes the script, and that includes every thought and every emotion. There is no me apart from you and yet here we are, dreamt characters in a love story without beginning or end. You are only the flickering light of a dream, as I am, and we are inseparable as we do our dance in this timeless instant. You are all my beloveds, as it is deeply felt that you are me and I am you, and yet we are not any thing or being at all.

You are the fragile illumination that appears and vanishes into a perfect endless night of infinite stars; each star unique in a timeless sky seen only in the ephemeral glimmers of starlight that shine like the luminescence in my eyes filled with the tears of a love that truly has no name.

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Love is that unspeakably heartbreaking realization that, even when the illusion of separation is seen through, it remains the only space where we can imagine we experience this indefinably and relentlessly beautiful dance of a life. It is the deep-seated awareness of the transient, ephemeral, and ever illusory nature of all that we behold and perceive. The awareness that all the apparent people and places that we love and lose and care about, all that fills us with awe, all we once yearned for, are simply a dream that never was at all. That every imagined thing and being can never be held, for there is only a flowing river and no separate drop of water to grasp. And no one there who could hold it, even if it could be held.

Love is the feeling that what is, “This,” is absolutely vast and impossibly unknowable. What I feel as love is an unnamable emotion beyond any human emotion I ever knew or imagined. An emotion that has no subject nor object. That is not even an emotion at all. Simply This: everything that appears, dancing like rain, like starlight, like the river of life itself.

LOVE'S FLAMING KISS

The love that we talk about is like a fire that incinerates its own ashes in an inferno of furious impossibility.

This love has teeth like a million sharks that devour all you think you are and the world you imagine you know.

This love is like the most devastating hurricane destroying everything in its path, and a tsunami that drowns itself.

This is the very end of everything and nothing, and if it is called love, it is Love as something intangible and indefinable, but also the most deeply felt and intuited aspect of what is.

Love is the explosion of life itself into an endless array of apparent forms that are not forms at all.

Love is the end of belief in the separate reality of any named things, yet it is not a feeling or idea, but that in which all feelings and emotions and ideas are born and die.

When the duality and meaning of all that appears is seen through, what is, this, is an edgeless ocean of awe-filled wonder and it can only be called love, knowing that the word is like showing you one grain of sand to describe the Sahara Desert.

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There was an interview where Tony Parsons was explaining his perception. And at one point he says, “There is only the beloved, the beloved is speaking to you right now.” I don’t remember the rest of the interview, but it didn’t seem to matter.

That is the heart of this message. For this is not about being in some emotionless sterile void. This is love, this is the volcano, this is the miracle that any appearance seems to be dreamed out of the misty swirling soup of all that is and is not, this is aliveness that drowns you like a tsunami, this is so far beyond simply the loss of personal identity that if you ever felt it, you would die a million deaths in heart stopping astonishment at the miracle of whatever seems to be appearing like a supernova exploding in every apparent instant in what you used to see as the most everyday experience of your indescribably extraordinary ordinary life. ♥