rewrite the world, unprotect, unfurl

IT’S THE LOVE, OF COURSE. The love in people’s eyes. That’s what makes them recognizable, what makes them come across as strong. That’s when we trust a voice or a hand; that’s what makes us beautiful at all.

When I was a child I grew up in a community that was spiritually based. That’s what the nightly meetings were about, the weekly potluck Sundays, the occasional festivals like Holi or Hans Jayanti. That’s what filled the room when we sang the Aarti. (As you can tell these are not Spanish nor English words. La Mezcla-Fantastica is the completamentelastica that has buoyed this boy’s happenstancika as I came up on this path!)

As I grew older, I always felt more at home with that community, even if I met members years later, or children I hadn’t seen since the days we were in childcare together at one of the festivals or when satsang was held (nightly) at someone’s house in the neighborhood. I thought this feeling was purely the familiarity of the community, or that we had shared an era…or a niche experience. I thought the comfort was purely cultural—which I admit, it is in no small part. The environments that surround us as children are never rivaled again. I’m sure a great part of my love for tortillas, and all that pervades my being when I smell that steamed corn is simply from the days I was young and my nanita was in my life.

But as I did grow older, and returned to attend speaking events and looked at the people there, I saw that the magnetic resonance was not so complicated or esoteric or superficial.

What drew me to those people and that community more than anything else (in their better moments; of course there are always crazies and strays in any group) was simply love. It’s the love in the eyes. These were people striving to be in touch with the most basic truths in a living being’s possession; they were doing their best to remain conscious and open and true. After all, religious paradigms and spiritual practices (and there’s a big difference between practices and paradigms, let us not skim over this!) exist not for themselves (and if they do, you know you are on a dead end) but to enable the human to access awareness, love, truth, clarity.

And when these things are alive in the face and hands and voice and eyes…a human being shines with light.

Now this is nothing new to you. You know that as people get afraid and jealous and scared their eyes can cloud with fear, or envy, or anger, or smugness…and tho no hard lines can be drawn around age or location or langauge, it’s not unreasonable to say that we travel from being children with giant orbs of liquid truth in our face with which to express our soul—to somewhat confused and crazy characters so well trained in eluding even our own detection that the eyes no longer stream love, they reflect and glimmer with hotspots overfocused as well as shadows that have bounced off seven sets of mirrors and each one with a different film on the surface.

But then there are times when the tensions fall away, the burred steel shields clatter to the ground, the sun rises over the ocean of the soul and beams forth from los ojos. When we engage truthfully with our desire and path and so let the Self fall away. Yesterday I wrote of the “lean toward DO.”

You will see it when an artist focuses on her work, or a mechanic is deeply engaged in a trying task, or a father carefully cleans the face of his daughter, or  an activist feels they have been given more power to do what it is she feels compelled to do in the world, or is in the company of others ready to fight the same fight that matters to her own heart. You can see this energy when a human looks out over beauty, or breathes deep the ocean mist into his body or when he deeply inhales the sex of a blooming and heated flower, or when he give himself without fear into the keeping of another he trusts or admires. And a million more examples. There are even more instigators of our love and joy as there are sources that would steal it from us.

Love, and some of this is what was in the air at the NAM Expo, or what you can find at any convention, and what rejazzes the heart. This is what works when friends work well together. This is what powers the muscles to not give up…yet.

I won’t go so far as to say “all you need is love” because if that were true, we wouldn’t have stomachs. (And yes, I get the metaphor which demands examination of the word “need” and that’s an important talk, too.) What my friend Erika calls a male’s propensity to become erect over all of life (and its a metaphorical erection she speaks of, right Erika?) is an embracing, a want to engage, to rumble, to feel, to fight, to know up close and all about and at once. She was saying it in the context that it’s not a will or behavior to be suppressed, this eager, stupid, lapping at and celebration of everything. She was maybe laughing at my being in love with everyone at the convention, but this is a joyful reaction from which I would not retreat; this way of leaping deep up and into the velvety keep of each and any river, mound, hill, or mountain no matter how steep. It is daring to bare the face, to love out loud and love and love more and love again, to offer my entirety to the Come Again; and again, even when crushed or doubtful or jealous or hopeless or momentarily riddled with face-cramping madness; to see these lacks and gaps as simply pulses of offness, of inbetweenness, of half the (off)beatness, of shadows that swim around a geyser and always agushing with light, to forget about getting it straight or sensible or getting it Right.

Remember what makes us move, what makes it worth it, what we bother to protect, what it is we hope to grow. And just move, and just flow, and just let it all go.