Love, love, love.
We hear about it, talk about it, yearn for it. In Western culture, we have a Hallmark Holiday for it - Valentine's Day - associated with chocolates, flowers (as symbols of one's love), and V-Day cards.
If Valentine's Day is truly about Love, then it's Valentine's Day every day of the year. Will you be my Valentine?
I'm a big fan of chocolates, actually, particularly good dark chocolate. Flowers are fabulous, tool.
But the Big Love? Mmmmm, well that's the ultimate, isn't it? At the heart of it, it's what everyone really seeks.
The Love we seek in our hearts and souls is what shaman and mystics call The Big Love, the essence of cosmic connection that fills us up from within and overflows in loving, compassionate expression.
It's what the sacred texts write about; it's what we truly seek, it's what we yearn to pour out on the world.
In mystical traditions, Love is what we are, what we're made of, what we come from. Like water is to a fish, Love is to us (and the fish, and the water, for that matter). Christian scripture reminds us that, "The greatest of these is Love."
Rumi, the Sufi poet and mystical Lover, writes, "Looking at my life, I see that only Love Has been my soul’s companion. From deep inside My soul cries out: Do not wait, surrender for the sake of Love."
But what is it, this Big Love we are, this Love we seek? If it's in us, around us, and what we're made from - the very fabric of our being - how could we not know it? How could we ever need to seek what we already are?
I'd read all the texts, said the 'dangerous prayer' of St. Francis of Assisi, "...make me an instrument of your Love" (my version), yet for a long time it seemed 'out there' rather than 'in here'.
Like others, I might have seen or felt fleeting glimpses of it, but like many of us in our culture particularly, I was pretty well 'armored against Love' -- armored in protection from a 'harsh world', as we're taught.
In the Summer of 2008, that changed. For a bit anyway, yet in a way that left me knowing what IT is, and that IT is possible.
In late-July of that year, after a radical series of events that cracked my heart wide open, I spent several days feeling that Big Love, like I was marinating it yet also filled with and radiating it.
For the first time I can remember consciously, I understood the scriptural wisdom, "Perfect Love casts out fear."
In those few days, I felt no fear. Neither could I reach any judgment about others. The armor had dissolved. Seeing through the 'eyes of Divine Love', everything and everyone looked different. Unconditionally.
It was bliss over those few days. The Big Love. Divine Love. I remember saying, "I want to breathe this, be this, eat this, sleep this, drink this, dream this, speak this, write this...".
After a few days, that peak experience waned, yet the experience was so vivid, it stayed with me.
Finding words for such a deeply-sensed experience is difficult, even for 'a woman of the word' like me.
Because unlike many cultures, which have many words for different experiences and expressions of Love, we have just one: I love a good burrito, I love dark chocolate, I love my family, I love my partner, I love my friends, I love you. I love the Source of that Love. I love getting together with friends over a good meal, with good wine and good conversation. Did I say I love chocolate and burritos? No wonder we're confused.
The gift of that experience in 2008 is a knowing that this Big Love of the mystics, Lovers, and poets really does exist around us and within us; a knowing that it's accessible, that while we've been pretty systematically taught to believe we're sinners when in fact we're love.
We've been taught to believe we're separate and 'out there' on our own when we're connected to everyone and everything, that we've been taught to believe we have to earn Love when it's what we are, well, that's the stuff that missions are made from.
If the Big Love is everywhere; if the Big Love is what made us, where we come from, what and who we are, then all we have to do is remember. It's in there. It's out there. We just have to open to it, to connect, to remember, to know, to ask. Eden, paradise, is when we all remember and express the Love that we are. Wow, what a Valentine's gift that would be!
Wishing you remembrance of the Big Love that you are! And enjoy the chocolate, flowers, romantic meals, and Valentine's cards.
Love,
Jamie
* Image Credit: Eros & Psyche, by Antonio Canova, Musee de Louevre, Paris
