Love your Work, Work your Love

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy. - Kahlil Gibran

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.
— Theodore Roethke

Still working through Ibiza through these posts, still healing (thanks be to God), still sifting and churning and living the stuff called life. I have freed myself to all possibilities, and am aware that my preference is just that, a prejudice.

What the ego asserts as its identity, ie I am this and not that, or being defined by one's likes and dislikes, is actually a giant wall. It is built on good intentions, and derives from the rainbow of being. Its mistake is taking one color and confusing it with the rainbow. This not only makes all other colors wrong, but it sets up the ego for disappointment should that shade not appear.

It is a big challenge to keep the heart open, let love in and let love out, and at the same time not make it personal. Real love is not personal. This is a transformational one to get. I understand it intellectually, but not on an energetic level. That's where I'm at.

It's important to look around and recognize this place, see how high the grass has grown, and sit in the chair in the front yard with blades caressing the calves, breathing in, breathing out, just letting be. That's where I'm at.

And I realize in this moment of reflection that I have been in the past attached to the object of my love to the point of consumption, coloring everything in its wake with that one, solitary color, to the point of blindness. This is what the first blush of chemical hormones can do, but the real challenge (read: transformational opportunity) available in a spiritual or real love is to let it go, because it may look and feel similar to a first blush, and so the ego wants to go into its mono-chromatic auto-pilot.

Letting something go is very different than throwing it away. It means not attaching a spiritual connection with the person the experience is tied to on the earthly plane. This does not take anything away from what took place. And it does not mean that the two people need to separate. It just means that they have acted as prisms for one another, where the light of love and God has come in at one end, through their bodies, which act as energy channels, and has then been exchanged in an infinity helix. The vibration has the power to get exponentially greater and greater, and the only thing that can stop it is fear.

Most of the time, it doesn't even get the chance to start its journey. This is why the experience of spiritual or real love has been mythically thought to occur once in a person's lifetime, and hence the concept of a soul mate or other half as one solitary individual that one must find in this lifetime or else. Or will get lucky enough to meet by chance, depending on how you look at it.

But that opening doesn't happen all that often, and if/when it does, we will happily label it that 'one and only', and give the other person all the credit for having shown us the light, the way and the truth, when in fact we have just created the opening for the energy to flow.

Essentially, we mistake the message for the messenger. And even as I write these words, which are also flowing through me, as opposed to coming from me, the dominant paradigm is so strong and unforgiving that it makes it hard to get the words out. Recognizing that is powerful, though. There is this fear, which wants to stay closed, wants to keep things personal, wants to stay the way it is forever, with the best of all intentions, of course.

The message here is that life is like one long session of open-heart surgery. Surgery not with scalpels and doctors and blood, but with courage and fear and energy. You can choose to fight that, but in the end, death will scoop you up in its arms either way. If you can release and let things (love, joy, happiness ...) flow when they seem so specific to just you, you, you and the other person; the full magic of the universe is in your hands.