Love can heal our pain, our fears, our wounds. Love can use our brokenness to change the world.

Love can transform weary souls to joy.  But you’ve got to want it and you need to turn around.

Don’t take my word for it. It’s what Jesus said.

There’s a stirring homeliness in the poetry of Mary Oliver.  How she arrives at the utterly human in charming and everyday ways – stripping down to the essentials of life with simplicity, gentleness and plain fact. Take these lines on about love from her poem Wild Geese…

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles

Through the desert repenting

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

Love what it loves[1]

Question (for you and me), do you know what the soft animal of your body loves?

I’m sure you could list with passion what it is that you ‘absolutely love’, but do you know what your body loves? Whether you know, or you’ve been left pondering, the question opens us up to the presence and activity of love that is given to us as our very body and the life that sustains it. It’s so easy to live without an awareness of such love, let alone have an appreciation of it. If you don’t know, you can’t let! Yet, it’s couched in deep simplicity. How could we not know what the very container for our life love’s? Maybe we’re too noisy? Too distracted? Too focused? Maybe being with our bodies, without distraction, is all too much to bear? Maybe we find it too confronting to not be in control?

The love Mary Oliver presents is a love free from the ties of worthiness. It is all gift. Just let yourself love what you love. Done. As Micheal Leunig stated “Love one another and you will be happy. It’s as easy and as difficult as that”.

Join the Revolution: Consecrating ourselves to Love

But, do we really know what love is? How do we grow it? We need to work at it. But it’s a different kind of work with a different end in mind. We’re not striving for merit or recognition. We’re cultivating an acceptance and an allowing for life to lead us, not for us to get ahead of life. It really is a revolution. An active turning away from the pull of modern life. A strong, sacred no for a strong, sacred yes.

Now, there’s no app, no set of steak knives if you order now. Far more naked than that. It’s just you, your intention and a willingness to start again. Remember, what you practice gets stronger. The working at it is both a letting go and a taking up. This dual activity is centred by a commitment to consecrating ourselves to love. More on that coming up.

First step – wake up! Are you really living consciously? What are you motivated by? Big questions – yes. But you’re worth it. This is your life and you have something to offer that you need to bring.

Second step – pause, find space. A gap that can become a crack that can open to the world. Listen and notice.

Third step – Fill the gap with a dedication to love.

It’s not as linear as I’ve outlined here, but these steps are the foundation of the revolution of love. Discover your own way to live into these steps, but find it. Maybe your entry point is your commitment to the practice of dedicating yourself to love.

JOIN THE REVOLUTION – Pause. Book Here.

Sometimes if we’re lucky and if we are wise,  we turn having arrived spent from chasing our petty needs and wants. Other times we can be brought to our knees in despair or are blessed by a kiss of grace, and we fall, often unwillingly, into an expansiveness made of love. It’s utter unconditional gracefulness meets us with surprise and we are undone -we are use to conditions, pace and absence. There are no fixed terms because of its nature, just  a hope to be received and entrusted. Its joy is not only that we are open, but that through our openness, it can continue to flow – if we let it. This I believe is where miracles happen and this is the revolution. This is what I am committing myself to in my work – to hold spaces for love to flow to the places of hurt and the spaces of healing.

The communal pattern of this movement is captured in these words by Jesuit palaeontologist Peirre Teilherd de Chardin. He writes:

“someday after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God, the energies of love…”

Being Led to a Whole-Hearted Way of Living

By dedicating ourselves to this kind of love, in our own way, we will be led to a wholehearted way of living. We will walk our way on this path if we are willing to and if we listen. This ancient, sacred call is named in the following lines from David Whyte’s poem, simply titled, Australia:

We feel it when we hear the growing whisper of rain feeding the parched ground, or in the inward growth that makes what has been hidden begin to show its face in the world, the unspoken sense, not of being free now, but the anticipation of being allowed into something deeper, further, beyond our living in the everyday, into the beckoning endless land, into the blue-hilled horizon, into the ocean’s mounting roar, an unspoken and indescribable freedom just about to happen, reaching for that fatal shore, we sight only the edge of this waiting land, riding forever, the slow, curling, but never breaking wave of our longed-for-arrival.

Stop, find a gap, open the crack and listen

Thankfully, although we forget it, we have the capacity to choose. It is this capacity that we can use to stop, find a gap, open the crack and listen. There are many wonderful teachers and traditions that can guide us. For me, the love guru is Gerald May and his book, The Awakened Heart: Opening Yourself to the Love you Need.[1]  I love the way he offers human spiritual practices to cultivate love without codifying the approach or reducing the mysterious essence of the love being sought.

The gift of May’s insights is that his wisdom responds to the understanding of the cultural pull for efficiency and the force behind the current. The sweep of this tide has only become stronger. As such, the need for the revolution has only become more urgent. We not only need to be rescued, we need to find ways of not entering these waters.

Starting the Love Revolution – (some gems from Chapter 1 of The Awakened Heart)

• First things First – Gerald May declares, “Love should come first…if we give love primacy…there will still be plenty of room to develop our capacities…Efficiency should be how love expresses its why…”

Dedicating ourselves to Love – “…living for love requires openness to love itself, a radical vulnerability to consciously begin in love.

To claim this is to enter a gentle warfare against immense internal and external forces. The enemy is that which would stifle your love: your fear of being hurt, addictions, the efficiency worship of the world…But the warfare must be gentle on your part. Your only weapon is love itself. David had a sling and knew how to use it, but love can never be used. It can only be embraced and trusted.

Owning and Claiming Love as our Identity – “The only way to own and claim love as our identity is to fall in love with love itself, to feel affection for our longing….embrace our incompleteness, be overwhelmed by the beauty of our need…the invitation of love is to be consciously, energetically alive and involved in love.

Efficiency asks, “Why do you say yes? We can only answer because I want to. Efficiency comes back with, “But for what reason and to what end?” And we can only say, “The only reason is my desire, and to that there is no end.”

Here’s to revolutionary love. To join – start practicing. If you want some practices for the love revolution (a song, journal prompts and more) here you are.

Also, I highly recommend the series of mind-body practices offered through the Trauma Research Foundation. You can register for free. More info here.

 

[1] https://www.harpercollins.com.au/9780061895760/the-awakened-heart/

[1] Wild Geese, by Mary Oliver

.[2] Australia, David Whyte, The Bell and the Blackbird. Many Rivers Press, Washington. 2018.