ONLY LOVE CAN BREAK YOUR HEART

 

I had to go to a nearby city to help one of our retreat guests arrange their travel plans home. We were in a market, and I was waiting for her to get some snacks for her trip. It was the first time I had been in a large crowd in years. Waves of people passed by, some with children, young, old, many styles of dress and cultures, some seemed anxious or upset, others laughing, some in a hurry as they looked through the aisles carrying little baskets filled with their favorite foods.

I had the sense of everyone’s ephemeral dream of life and how they likely felt so real and had stories that seemed to shape their world. They all seemed to come and go like ghosts, as we all do, appearing in this unknowable dream and then vanishing as if they never were at all. It all seemed so poignant and beautiful and I can only say that here it felt like love.

Love is simply the fragile dream of life, however it appears; it’s that intimate realization that there were no separate people in a store, and no separate me, even with the appearance of bodies and things. I know some religions say you can feel love for everyone, but it isn’t like that at all. It's more that the appearance of whatever this is, call it life or "this," evokes an emotion that is both impersonal and yet seems the essence of all that appears. Love is not something that is real “out there,” in the sense that it’s felt in the perceptual field of what we call a human character, and it seems that all that appears is an impressionistic painting without any actual meaning or definition.

And yet there is no world “out there" I can ever know that is not this world of imaginary separation. So maybe love is just the feeling that happens when there is no longer a separate you apart from anything that appears, and it’s no longer possible to feel certain human emotions. Without separation there can’t be anger or hate or jealousy or regret or fear or belief in any meaning, yet seeing these traits appear in others is like seeing the wind or rain, and even someone screaming at me in a fit of rage feels like love as much as someone telling me they love me. Life seen without good or bad or right or wrong or even the belief in truly separate people or things feels a certain way, and love is as close a word as I can use to describe it. It’s not a love I can ever explain, and of course it's not actually love or even any thing at all.

All the words we can say about love can only evoke a poignant, ineffable feeling that points to something felt but unknowable, glimmering like a distant star on a dark, cold winter’s night. Yet that flickering luminescence, echoing in a dream without edges, is enough to kindle the fire of love in our imaginary and unfathomably beautiful hearts. "What is" really isn’t in any words at all (not even "what is"), and love is not an actual thing. I've tried to come up with a better way of saying it, but keep falling back on love.

Love is the feeling that sees what is called beauty and horror and suffering and joy and a myriad of forms and beings and thoughts and emotions as appearances in an inseparable aliveness beyond the human ability to truly comprehend. It is a terrible love in that it washes away every separate thing and idea and belief, including love itself.

And love can be confused with those who say we are all oneness or some imaginary ground of being. But love is not a concept, but the end of knowing what or how or why, or imagining any ultimate truth. Without separation, there is nothing happening that we can isolate; all is life manifesting as a billion apparent expressions that have no beginning or end or separate parts.

Love is and is not, and yet, here it is, the music of life itself that plays a lovesong in which we can share the most beautiful and awe-filled stories as we dance through this fairy tale dream of this and that and every thing and no thing at all. 💓