Love and Change

When I look at that clean crack in the mountain I wonder about the week it happened.  Was it filled with debris that later washed away revealing the beauty of these two facing cliffs?  Maybe it was unclear at first which was debris and which the reconfigured mountain.

Or those tall perfect cones of red cinder stones near my brother’s house, each stone so light it floats.  What spewed so hot and long to cause these beauties to litter the landscape?  And the hillsides of glass obsidian, sharper than any steel blade?  What a wild ride, the earth in her fiery ecstasy of change. 

But that is not the way profound change feels when it happens.  The land shifts under the feet.  What is debris, and what the mountain?  What the sharp edge against which I am reshaped?  Finally I give way my effort to know.  How can I understand the becoming from what I’ve been?  

And this is when sometimes something else happens.  Unrelated to anything the divine presence of love floods my heart, like water to dry roots.  I am open – not as an idea – but as the felt, physiological experience of love.  A bridge forms; what was foreign or object is claimed.  Each time this happens it is a new miracle as if it hasn’t happened before.  This is not about partners, or sex or longing, not about cute kids and puppies, but is entirely sufficient in itself

I can generate gratefulness, which always moves my spirit.  I can deliberately move toward gentleness, kindness, become softer, but the power isn’t present.  .  I think papa would say this is divinity loving me, loving through me.  Like a waterfall.  Or the wind.  Or the way God loves springtime in the mountains.

The books I’ve read, the conferences attended, the degrees, and, yes, all the therapy – these were necessary.  But in the presence of love, ideas and who said what last week matter little.  The full heady rush of love is completely outside my ability to create by will or determination.  True, I can turn from nourishing negative states; I can nourish gratitude, faith, etc. – till the ground in this way, but I do not cause the seed to sprout.

Am I sputtering?  Like the first time I realized the gray trunks of trees aren’t gray at all.  I almost drove off the road trying to show people the purple trees.  Drug free.  Promise.