our broken love

One of the great powers of love is balance;
it helps us move toward transfiguration.
When two people come together, an ancient circle closes between them.
They also come to each other not with empty hands,
but with hands full of gifts for each other.
Often these are wounded gifts;
this awakens the dimension of healing within love.
When you really love someone,
you shine the light of your soul on the beloved.
We know from nature that sunlight brings everything to growth.
It you look at flowers early on a spring morning,
they are all closed.
When the light of the sun catches them,
they trustingly open out and give themselves to the new light.

A person should always offer a prayer of graciousness 

for the love that has awakened in them. When you feel love for your beloved 

and the beloved’s love for you, now and again you should offer the warmth 

of your love as a blessing for those who are damaged and unloved. 

 

Send that love out into the world to people who are desperate, 

to those who are starving, to those who are trapped in prison,

 in hospitals, and into all the brutal terrains of bleak and tormented lives. 

 

When you send that love out from the bountifulness of your own love, 

it reaches other people. This love is the deepest power of prayer. . . .

 

 When there is love in your life, you should share it spiritually 

with those who are pushed to the very edge of life. 

 

There is a lovely idea in the Celtic tradition that if you send out goodness

 from yourself, or if you share that which is happy or good within you, 

it will all come back to you multiplied ten thousand times.

~ John O'Donohue

from Anam Cara 

one winter afternoon

one winter afternoon

(at the magical hour
when is becomes if) 

a bespangled clown
standing on eighth street
handed me a flower. 

Nobody,it’s safe
to say,observed him but 

myself,and why?because 

without any doubt he was
whatever(first and last) 

mostpeople fear most:
a mystery for which i’ve
no word except alive 

—that is,completely alert
and miraculously whole; 

with not merely a mind and a heart 

but unquestionably a soul-
by no means funereally hilarious 

(or otherwise democratic)
but essentially poetic
or ethereally serious: 

a fine not a coarse clown
(no mob, but a person) 

and while never saying a word 

who was anything but dumb;
since the silence of him 

self sang like a bird.
Mostpeople have been heard
screaming for international 

measures that render hell rational
—i thank heaven somebody’s crazy 

enough to give me a daisy 

~ E. E. Cummings

 art by Chagall

"love me."

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them, "Love me."

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise

someone would call the cops.

Still, though, think about this, this great pull in us to connect.

Why not become the one who lives with a

full moon in each eye that is 

always saying,

With that sweet moon language,

what every other eye in 

this world is

dying to 

hear?

~  Hafiz

. 

finding out what love is

.

Love is the unknowable. It can be realized only when the known is understood and transcended. Only when the mind is free of the known, then only there will be love. 

So, we must approach love negatively, not positively.

What is love to most of us? With us, when we love, in it there is possessiveness, dominance, or subservience. From this possession arises jealously and fear of loss, and we legalize this possessive instinct. From possessiveness arise jealousy and the innumerable conflicts with which each one is familiar. Possessiveness, then, is not love. Nor is love sentimental. To be sentimental, to be emotional, excludes love.Sensitivity and emotions are merely sensations.

. . . Love alone can transform insanity, confusion, and strife. No system, no theory of the left or of the right can bring peace and happiness to man. Where there is love, there is no possessiveness, no envy; there is mercy and compassion, not in theory, but actually for your wife and for your children, for your neighbor and for your servant. . . . Love alone can bring about mercy and beauty, order and peace. There is love with its blessing when "you" cease to be.

~ J. Krishnamurti

from The Book of Life

love and emptiness

Love and emptiness cannot abide together, when there is the feeling of loneliness, love is not.  You may hide emptiness under the word love, but when the object of your love is no longer there or does not respond, then you are aware of emptiness, you are frustrated.  We use the word love as a means of escaping from ourselves, from our own insufficiency.  We cling to the one we love, we are jealous, we miss him when he is not there and are utterly lost when he dies; and then we seek comfort in some other form, in some belief, in some substitute.  Is all this love?  Love is not an idea, the result of association; love is not something to be used as an escape from our own wretchedness, and when we do so use it, we make problems which have no solutions.  Love is not an abstraction, but its reality can be experienced only when idea, mind, is no longer the supreme factor.

So I see this emptiness, I see how it has come into being, I am aware that will or any other activity exerted to dispel the creator of this emptiness is only another form of self-centered activity.  So I realize that I cannot do anything, that the more I try to do something about it, the more I am creating and building walls of isolation.  Before, I used energy to fill this emptiness, wandered all over the place, and now I see the absurdity of it -  Thought becomes quiet; the mind becomes completely still; there is silence.  In that silence there is no loneliness.  When there is that silence, that complete silence of the mind, there is beauty and love.  

 

J. Krishnamurti  

from On Love and Loneliness

art by Van Gogh