Busting the Illusion of Separateness on Valentines Day
I want to write about Love. Even though talk of war is everywhere. Even though it feels like we haven’t even finished limping out of the last catastrophe yet. Even though my desk and my inbox are cluttered with more pressing urgencies.
I want to write about Love. Even though it’s cliche to write about love on Valentine’s Day.
I want to write about Love. Even though it feels like the most written about topic out there. Even though there’s probably nothing new I could add to the cannon. Even though Love, by its very nature, cannot be explained in words.
The process of healing codependency, for me, has meant awakening to the understanding that Love is not another person. It’s an energy. We can have it anytime, all the time. It’s not a show you need a ticket to. It’s not a door that can close and refuse to let you in. It doesn’t belong to “lucky” people or “other” people. It belongs to itself.
Love is a cake left out on the kitchen counter with a serving knife beside it. We are free to help ourselves but some of us are scared to believe that’s true. We’re shy to take a piece and demonstrate the size of our hunger. Or we can’t trust ourselves not to take too much. Some of us stand next to the cake for small eternities, negotiating with ourselves internally. To have or not to have. To trust or to despair.
Leonard Cohen wrote: “If you don’t become the ocean, you’ll be seasick every day.”
I think of Love this way. If we don’t uncross the wires between Love as an energy, our birthright, our essence - and Romantic Love, which is often complicated and contingent upon another person’s capacity - we run the risk of spending the whole entire dance waiting for a partner to ask us out onto the floor, instead of letting the music move us right here, right now, from the spot upon which we stand.
Love is not just patient and kind and forgiving. It is patience and kindness and forgiveness. In Buddhism, to deeply listen is a form of love. When we extend patience and kindness and forgiveness to ourselves, when we take the time to deeply listen to our own Souls and consider their longings, we are in alignment with Love. To live in alignment with Love is to never be lonely.
So perhaps the epidemic of loneliness is an epidemic of illusions. Mainly, the illusion that we are separate from Love as a force field or from one another; as though a wave could ever be separate from the ocean.
These are only tricks of perception. When we take the time to drop down and feel our resonance with the hum of life force beating through our own bodies, pulsing in the environment around us, dappled in the light that filters in through tree branches and curtains hanging down in front of windows, we can find relief. We can come home to our true nature. Which is connection. Which is Love.
Even when our hearts and minds have been closed a long time, Love is there. Like a traveling salesman who never gave up. Waiting at the door. Waiting for us to answer. Waiting for us to buy what Love is selling. What was free, all along.
With LOVE and connectedness to you all,
