Love

It is tempting to equate love with sentiment. Who doesn't enjoy infatuation and sexual titillation, once these drugs are discovered during adolescent hormonal rushes? But, I have grown to see love as behavior, as a process, as a growing entity with its own life.

I believe sustaining love is planted and tended like a tree by those who love. The seed of love can be sex, sentiment, blood relationship. The sapling of love is the early discovery that comes with time and shared experience. The tree of love is the pruned and shaped understanding and dialogue which can withstand drought and storm. The fruit of love is the sense of belonging with another who knows and accepts your deepest truth.

Love is supported by commitment. It can be accelerated by sex. It is fed by communication. It is strengthened by ongoing affection. Learning to love one person deeply and completely opens the heart and mind to loving the world. Never experiencing deep love leads to mental illness and alienation from the world.

The greatest challenge of love for some is letting it into their lives. Money, role, material success and possessions are common barriers against loving and being loved. Loving requires vulnerability and sacrifice of some boundaries and barriers. It also requires the personal confidence and self-understanding to remain a whole individual while loving another completely.

Like a healthy forest, a full life contains loves of many varieties and levels of maturity. Love can be contained within a simple interaction on the street, a sprouted seed which does not grow but has life and value. Certain relationships may remain contained by business or other boundaries. The love in these relationships can grow like an elegant dwarfed bonsai, shaped by more formal manners and behaviors. Love in other relationships takes root and grows wildly from sexual passion into an ever-changing canopy of shared experience and understanding. These tall trees of long relationships lend shade and protection to new loves, planted in our lives.

The art of loving is practiced with the mind as well as with emotion. Loving is intentional behavior. Communication os essential to developing mindful love between human beings. The communication of words and the communication of physical affection have equal power. I believe any practice for human growth entails practicing the art of loving.

Flowers

cut flowers, dead things,

once glorious sex pots,

then reeling in fat bees,

in vases, drooping limp,

in fungus-funky water,

sweet. rotting, fragrant

spores poisoning the air

of new lovers, courted,

soon abandoned, wilted.

House

a house is not a gnome

in the garden nor castle
from plywood and nails.

at best it's shelter from
prying eyes, cold or heat
of the night or blue days.

at worst it's a holy shrine
of flash and shining ego
with designer labels about.

materialism won't feed
you, homeless in the night,

even in an ivory mansion.

move the furniture now

and throw everything out.

windows and doors wide.

do welcome in the outside.

make your own house just,

a place for love and peace.

Identity

Identity can be the foundation of individual human development in early life, yet it can become a retardant to individual human growth in later life. Young people need to develop a sense of self in relation to their environment to grow out of the narcissism of adolescence to a socialized and independent adulthood. Recent psycho-social research in wealthy countries shows that this process is prolonged into the third decade of life as prosperity and longevity increase in societies.

In later life, the reflexive animal fear of change, stimulated by progressive experiences of loss, trauma and the unpredictable nature of life, often leads people to form a rigid self-concept: 'I don't do that. I wouldn't go there. I must have my this or that.' These collected 'I do's' and 'I don'ts' form an identity that can become a prison, which confines and stifles.

Liberation from identity comes with the understanding of the inevitability of death. I am not referring to the trite 'We are all dying' attitudes seen in popular media. Understanding the inevitability of my own death has come with touching death. I have been close to my own death twice. I have nursed hundreds of dying patients. I have washed bodies for burial. I have lowered the eyelids of people I have known and loved in life. This has brought me liberation from elements of my identity which were indeed narrowing my life.

Identity is best kept fluid in practice. Always expanding and sometimes contracting. Openness to the new, balanced with faithfulness to truth, mindfulness and compassion, allows for personal growth. A vital, growing person need not worry about identity, as long as his/her growth is based in responsible and loving practice toward the human beings in his/her life. I am quite sure that love of others, rather than identity, is the core of any mindful and compassionate practice.

Loving

Loving is a process, as opposed to LOVE, a vague and often commercialized thing for which millions yearn but never find.

Loving is an act of mind and choice in every moment. Loving is the neutralization of hatred and anger towards others in the moment. Loving is giving patience as a gift to yourself and others. Loving is taking and extra breath, counting to ten, thinking before saying. Loving is paying attention to the needs of others before thinking of your own. Loving is being brutally honest when it is the right thing to do. Loving is refraining from using honesty as a weapon. Loving is accepting and exchanging loving freely. Loving is the middle path. Loving has nothing to do with orgasms.

Loving is a part of being and becoming an evolved person. Loving is an essence of practice.

Love

Being absorbed with living without being absorbed with loving makes people act like solitary animals in the wild.

Don't feed the bears, but love them from afar.

Love

To love humanity is both a great challenge and a great gift when practiced moment to moment in an overpopulated and industrialized world. Overwhelmed by the vastness of our species' numbers, we squirrel away our love and compassion for those 'special' human beings, whom we deem to be so. To open to all humanity from moment to moment is like jumping from a plane after learning to be defended by upbringing and by the traumas of growing up. To reject labeling and categorizing from moment to moment is extremely hard for me. However, when I achieve success in a given moment, I feel whole, liberated, at one with the Universe. Practice is the constant exercise or quest to achieve that love of humanity and all beings.