The future is a lot like the present in that we are separate from where we want to be. That’s just how it is. Instead of all this knowing, doing and fixing, if you could just be still. Move, move in circles–and in the middle of the moving circle encounter a portal of stillness. In the stillness, the beloved visits. You have to be careful to be really still, so still, like a cat watching a canary, ready, alert and waiting. What if the beloved comes, yet you miss that moment, because of the busyness of your mind?. And instead of the sighting of the guru you barely smell the aroma, because just at the moment when the worlds unite, your attention wanders to what’s for dinner tonight, or you forget to breathe? or the phone vibrates or you start thinking of you in relation to someone and thus lose that precious moment of stillness.
We waste much of the opportunity to connect with our divinity in meaningless thoughts and activity. It isn’t really work or people that saps us, but the meaning we attach to it and how it makes us feel. It isn’t really our life, but how we relate with it, the stories we tell ourselves and others that keep us separate and alone, even though the beloved is always waiting for us to look within. But they have politicized this meeting, romanticized it, materialized it, created all these identities around it and so the simplest of things is now complicated. You have to pray some say. Some say this mantra. Use this wand. Read this book. Follow so and so. And you’ve got all these identities too–if you are this, then you can’t seek the beloved this way, that way.
Human beings have created many separations, and barriers from the source of our experience. It is a wonder anyone ever finds the beloved. They’ve labeled all these boxes, trying to capture the beloved in a set of beliefs and rituals and yet, none of them have the beloved. The beloved eludes them all. The beloved doesn’t live in lifeless categories, rituals and rules. The beloved can only be found in that which is most alive, most itself, intensely true and since the Source is not a thing but a life force that creates all things, the beloved can only be found in that kind of thing that makes you feel alive. The feelings of aliveness are the co-ordinates to the beloved.
For many of us, being utterly alive involves other living beings. How can we love the beloved without loving human beings….animals, plants, art and all the wonders of the world? Until we fall in love with the creations of the beloved, how can we ever find the way home? Love is our path and our destiny. Don’t be afraid of love. Don’t judge the love you feel. Loving isn’t about whether it is appropriate or deserved or successful, it is an experience that opens the heart and creates the path through which the beloved can enter. If you fall in love, but you cannot be with your love, that’s incredible, you now know just how intensely the beloved loves you. That same aching loneliness, that wanting and that craving. That’s how much the beloved loves you, and wants you to return home. So, when one day, you just stop judging yourself for every experience of love that you’ve ever had. When you stop attaching shame, fear sorrow and pride to love, you can start to take those steps that lead you home. Your courage to experience real love breaks down all the barriers within you….and that’s when all the love you’ve ever wanted and craved breaks lose, from wherever you dammed it and you become so full of love, that there is no need for anyone’s love.
It means that you won’t ever again feel lonely, or feel like you need love or that anything is missing in your life. It means being full of gratitude for your breath and the chance to look at the beloved every day, every minute, and witness the great act of nature. All this is here for your eyes and the act of witnessing yourself makes you bow and bow again in reverence for this experience. You realize how precious each minute is, and how you must love more and more. And all you want is to keep saying I love you. And your state of ecstatic witnessing makes you whirl to find stillness within. And when you stop whirling you hug and when you stop hugging you whirl. Such is the vision of life that the beloved has for you. Love is work is love is play, as you whirl and dance around the pillar of love that is within you.
we came whirling
out of nothingness
scattering stars
like dustthe stars made a circle
and in the middle
we dancethe wheel of heaven
circles God
like a millif you grab a spoke
it will tear your hand offturning and turning
it sunders
all attachmentwere that wheel not in love
it would cry
“enough! how long this turning?”every atom
turns bewilderedbeggars circle tables
dogs circle carrion
the lover circles
his own heartashamed,
I circle shamea ruined water wheel
whichever way I turn
is the riverif that rusty old sky
creaks to a stop
still, still I turnand it is only God
circling Himself
~Rumi~
