What Remains

This week, a beloved aunt passed away.  My cousin eulogized her beautifully.  She was, by societal standards, a 'simple' woman - yet she was nothing less than a force of life and love, and her loss is deeply grieved.  Is it not 'simple' qualities like the ones she possessed which truly remain and allow us to touch the infinite in our mortal dress?

I have been pretty 'roughed up' for my beliefs about life, truth, love and justice, but my commitment to them only deepens and I hold them even closer, despite all the evidence that seems to point to the contrary, and all the challenges and losses I've faced in my desire to honour them. 

Why?

For as much evidence that tears away at them, I find more that leads me into the heart of them when I am able to see with the eyes of my true nature.  It is through the little things that the infinite often sounds its potent existence. 

This past week, it was the way the sun bathed her coffin at the front of the church in the midst of days that have been remarkable only for the depth of their greyness and chill.  It was in the rivers of tears that spoke of her capcity to love in this life, and the dignity summoned by those who loved her back to honour her in the midst of their unfathomable grief.  It was also in the smiles and joy of the children too young to understand this loss, yet wise enough to bring forth their new life to shine on broken hearts - their medicine the balm that tugs gently at the hollowness, a reminder to return again to the gift of embodiment that remains for those who live.

The doorway to the infinite was there even more potently when a beautiful teacher of indigenous ways raised her ancestral pipe in ceremony to see my aunt's life in its barest essence.  I cried at the reverberations of the truth of her message.

When we leave our mortal dress, what remains?

I believe it is the essence with which we tried to live the eternal in our finite existence.  How well did we love, pursue truth, heal, seek justice, act courageously, and embody the gift of life more fully through gratitude, joy and creativity?

These are the infinite gifts granted to our humble lives. Our task, one that is often not easy, is to say - in spite of it all - Yes.

Power & Love

So many people are working to shift our collective trajectory at this time.  The movement, as Paul Hawken writes, is a "blessed unrest" - a myriad of individuals, groups and movements seeking to restore balance to the world.  What are the challenges that undermine this work?  How can we become better, more conscious, more loving, and more powerful agents of positive change?

In his new book Power and Love, Adam Kahane explores our two fundamental human drives: power, which he defines as the focused pursuit to achieve one's solitary purpose, and love, the drive towards unity.  When we fall into either extreme, we are not as effective as we need to be.  We either escalate conflict by pushing for our own agenda at all costs, or we avoid conflict to keep a false peace and harmony.  Either approach taken without a respect for the other lands us into trouble.  Kahane quotes Martin Luther King: “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic.”


We are challenged to hold the paradox of both.  Yet this is not as easy as it sounds, as I think we have all been imprinted by the toxic power drives that have so imbalanced our world.  Power has ruled without love in our world for a long time, and we are dealing with the consequences today. Without a conscious effort to healing that split within ourselves, we are vulnerable to falling into either side of the abyss.  Where do victim and victimizer find peace?

Somewhere in our minds and hearts are the answers, I think - pulsing with vitality and clarity, yet vulnerable enough to yearn and reach for what we long for in the deepest corners of our being.

Can we trust ourselves enough to use our power with conscious, loving intent?  Do we love fiercely enough to move us into our true power? 

Can we join together, empowered in our love, to do what needs to be done to ensure a better future?

A Woman's Love

The subtitle I wanted to add to the above was "Precious or Pernicious?" I am wondering if there is anything in the world less trusted, or perhaps less valued at a collective level, than a woman's authentic love. 

I am not trying to exclude men or folks along the gender binary here, but want to speak from the reality of my own experience and what I have come to understand through my conversations with,  and my engagement with the work of, other women.  I know that all people suffer from not having healthy avenues of expression for their love.  What I would like to touch upon here is how women's love can be taken up and perceived when it is expressed.

Does our struggle to honour women's loving have to do with our psychological struggle with our own mothers, and our spiritual struggle to see the feminine valued in the world?

When a woman expresses her love, gives from her heart, and speaks from her deepest truth, I see again and again that these acts are put under a suspicious microscope.  Being real in our loving (which encompasses many things, including honouring our truth) can often put us in direct line of projections.  This creates a vicious cycle.  The more we experience our deepest authenticity being unwelcome in a power-driven world, the more we hide that essence, or become more skilled in disguising it, or more strategic in protecting the truth of our being and knowing, which makes us feel like we are hiding a shameful secret (Shhh...don't let them know you love that much!).  The most dangerous thing it seems we can be in our current cultural climate is genuinely open-hearted and honest.

Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that power does often masquerade as love in our lives.  When we are experiencing the real thing, it's hard to know if it can be trusted.  Conversely, we can get severely hurt by mistaking love that really isn't love at all for the real thing, and that gets us into all kinds of challenging and painful situations.

Our bodies can be our greatest friends in helping us to know the genuine from the false, but having ignored our body's wisdom for a long time, this takes patience and skill.  How do we know when our old fears and wounds are getting triggered?  How can we know if the feeling of mirroring we are experiencing in a relationship is genuine?  Again, the devaluation of the feminine principle that is reflected in our disembodiment needs to be challenged in order to befriend the wisdom of our most trusted ally, which is our body, our very matter.

Learning the language of our greatest guide can then release us into what Mary Hamilton refers to as "original flesh" in her book The Dragonfly Principle: An Exploration of the Body's Function in Unfolding Spirituality.  Honouring and expressing our body's innate capacity for love and joy allows us to be more capable of receiving the love of another.

As we become more embodied in our spirituality, the hope is that the feminine depths of love that we are capable of expressing will be restored to a cherished place within our world, and that its extraordinary ability to heal and renew is remembered for nothing less than what it is:

The sacred essence of peace.

Life's Exquisite Promise

To believe that love is stronger than fear and hatred is the most radical idea to embrace.  I would argue that it is more radical than any political philosophical position.  How does one live this in a world so fractured?  How do we embrace this within our own wounded hearts?  What does this mean in the context of life's realities, and our personal and professional obligations and responsibilities?  How is an open heart lived within the paradox of the fundamental need to protect oneself and others from harm?  How do we allow ourselves to be inspired by transpersonal ideas and symbols, yet work to manifest these within the small and immediate realm of our human lives and communities?

From an early age, I have been asking questions centred around the reality of love, and its possibilities for transforming our world.  Rilke's words have helped me in this inquiry - an inquiry that has been (and I would imagine will continue to be) full of challenges, contradictions, pain and joy.  In Letters to a Young Poet he writes:

...I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.

Now that I am entering early middle age, I revisit Rilke's words again with a more experienced eye, and a fuller and wiser heart.  I glimpse an implicate order where myriad manifestations of its stunning accuracy reveal themselves if I pay attention.  I recognize the capacity of life to bring me into situations that, if responded to from my deepest truth, reveal their brilliant tendrils forcing me, leading me, to greater wholeness and healing.  I am brought face to face with my deepest fears, my hidden wounds, and my unclaimed gifts.  I am brought face to face with my capacity to love, forgive and learn in the face of life's unrelenting force of will. 

Life is the most radical, transformative classroom of all, and its lesson, its promise, is so simple that it is always a learning in process, one that takes lifetimes to master:

Love.