October 9, 2011
That love will conquer all is probably one of the most common of clichés. However, the resilience of love will overcome any resistance, melting away its force and disolving any obstacles in its way. Its power is to a subtetly which is both insidiously disarming and terrifying when uncovered for what it truly is.
It comes in all forms, unique and universal, tragic and tranversal, deep with dispersal, ripe with reveral, mythic and magic like a force of endless dismissal.
What we scarcely realize until it is too light is the great price at which it comes. Love requests of us complete surrender, acceptance, facing our deepest, darkest corners and a willingness to look at them squarely, see them as they are without dressing them up, sharply slicing costume away, breaking down our illusions and unmasking our splitting realities.
In moments of great clarity, everything that the mind seems normally able to rest on begins to split at the seems. Initially this is an uncomfortable shift, it feels ruthless, brutal, almost violent. We scream. We resist. But it persists.
I come back with my birthing metaphor, as it is so perfect an analogy for the growth that occurs and how love is the driving force which animates both the drive to expand and alleviates the pain of swelling and shifting into that expansion.
Stepping outside of our comfort zone, taking great risks and moving forward with faith is an essential component of growth. No growth can happen without this. On the flip side, the sacrifice of love is also found in accepting the discomfort of opening ourselves to unplesant experience so that we may transform ourselves, and those around us.
By allowing ourselves to be so open and vulnerable we create space for reconfiguration, reformulation, reiteration and reinterpretations of being and reality that shape newer ways of being into exalted expressions of the essential self, meeting our highest potential.
Below is a poem a beloved friend read to me recently, which emphasizes to me the stronghold love can have on us, the playfulness that can seem so harsh at moments, but in the end provides a threat to grow, ushering us into opening new spaces and flowering into higher forms of being.
To do this we must be prepared to accept our own humanity, greet it with a knowing smile that displays love and humour, occasionally dropping the sweetness of speech in favour of a tougher approach that ruffles our feathers, turns us upside down a bit and shows us the world from a new perspective. If we allow ourselves to be open to these experiences, the world upside down can suddenly awaken us into letting go of what we thought we knew and what we held so dear; reliquinshing the need to escape and stepping instead into a space of gratitude for all our silly human nonsense, where we may infinite joy and limitless love in the liminal space in between the stretch of the imagination.
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Tired of speaking sweetly (quoted “The gift” – Poems by Hafiz)
Love wants to reach out and manhandle us
Break all our teacup talk of God.
If you had the courage and
Could give the Beloved His choice, some nights,
He would just drag you around the room
By your hair,
Ripping from your grip all those toys in the world
That bring you joy
Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly
And wants to rip to shreds
All your erroneous notions of truth
That makes you fight within yourself, dear one
And with others,
Causing the world to weep
On too many fine days.
God wants to manhandle us,
Lock us inside of a tiny room with Himself
And practice his dropkick.
The Beloved sometimes wants
To do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down
And shake all the nonsense out.
But when we hear
He is such a “playful druken mood”
Most everyone I know
Quickly packs teir bags and hightails it
Out of town