Living as if Love Matters
The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.
-- Jane Hirshfield, “The Weighing”
These are rumpling times. Some days my heart is on the ground, as our elder Grandmother Red Leaf used to say. I continue to learn about the broad spectrum of heartbreak-become-heart-broken-open. And always I turn to the bees as I have done for the last twenty years, the wing-ed angels that have colonized my heart with their infinite blessings. I have spent thousands of hours in the bee sanctuary … watching, listening and recalibrating. The turbulence of the world is not there.
Across the years of sharing my bee-loving heart, the top two questions I still get are: How are the bees doing? How can I help? I used to do public talks exploring the main challenges bees face, like pesticides, loss of habitat, climate change, disease, and compromised genetics. One day I got tired of what was coming out of my own mouth. I realized that all those causes threaded back to one thing: poor human choices. Asleep people. The bees are not a threat to themselves. That lies at our door. It is not a fruitful path to blame other people, so I decided that the best thing I could do was commit myself to bringing more loving awareness and presence to my own life. So I could be better company.
It all comes down to love … to love the bees, or at least love who you love so passionately that it wells up and out of the cup of you like a great warm honeyed libation, pouring over all of life (which happens to include the bees and everyone else). It’s not so much who we love as that we love. Let us take our love more seriously. It is the epi-center of what is real in this life. These are noisy, distracting times full of old narratives that can seduce us into believing our love, including the teeny little droplets of it, is insignificant and could not possibly make a difference. This is not true.
Love is a magnificent quantum field that is hidden in plain sight and is shaking awake in our consciousness. Love is (truly) disarming and does not obey the rules of day-to-day life. It is an act of holy rebellion for the benefit of all life.
This is not about the size of our offerings. It is about bringing loving presence to even the smallest of our acts and connecting the dots with the wider world, moving from isolation to connectedness. Whether this is done by feeling, faith or experiment, guidance then begins to emerge, shining a light on what to do and what not to do … and there is peace in that distinction. This field is where your favorite grandparent lives, where poetry is alive, your body relaxes, courage grows, where the muses are whispering (to you), and where you are not alone. It is what your dog and cat have been telling you all along.
So where to begin? The poet David Whyte says to start close in: Start with / the ground / you know, / the pale ground / beneath your feet, / your own / way to begin / the conversation.1 Love who you love, humans and other-than, in your unique way. Then love them more. Be creative there. And keep going, day by day, act by act, with those who occur to you and others who just come along. In our region, Hurricane Helene wreaked utter havoc and in the aftermath, I witnessed more kindness and generosity than in the whole of my life. It has changed our community and sits well in the heart. I don’t think it is even our business to know where our love takes us, but each step we make and take adds to the wealth of this world we all call home.
I will end with a little story from earlier this week. The Mouse Nation sometimes visits our basement. I am the queen of collecting all kinds of humane mouse catchers and know what mice love to eat. I relocate them far into the woods beyond our house, to a place of shelter in the rocks … leaving them with some food, water and nesting material. Yesterday, I read that the poet Jane Hirshfield, in the first throws of the Covid lockdown, was sequestered at home. An ant came into the house on her morning newspaper and she found a way to safely usher it out (for a better future). It was a simple something she could do. Then she wrote a poem about it called, Today, When I Could Do Nothing. The poem went viral and touched a lot of people who felt utterly incapacitated. There is always something we can do.
Who do you love? What can you do to love them more? If you feel so moved, tell us about that. We appreciate your comments and read them all.
My mantra this year is: Eyes open, heart open, love more. This love thing is a practice. I am in the business of keeping my light lit and I will not be distracted. Holy Mischief is one tributary of response to the world at this time. Nothing can diminish our light unless we agree to it … let us help each other with that.
Thank you for being here! Looking forward to what Filiz stirs up next Saturday.
❤️ Debra
From David Whyte’s poem, “Start Close In”
I love the story of relocating the mice and providing them a premium home in the forest. Thank you for inviting us to sit with one of the most essential questions in life.
“My work is loving the world” This line from Mary Oliver’s poem “Messenger” has been with me like a mantra over the years. Your question expands in my mind as “who and what do I love?” Because I immediately feel the presence of more than human world. The almond blossoms that are blooming right now, the hawk that circles above my head, the smell of rain on the earth, the gentle touch of water in the sea near my home… the poems that carry me through the despair or the songs of the ancestors of my land that teach me patience and lightheartedness.
And I am a student and an apprentice to loving humans and human experience in the Earth School.
It’s a beautiful game (or experiment) to feel the heart, feel the sun shining there, illuminating everything it touches with its warmth, when it’s directed to whatever we see at that given moment. Maybe a friend talking to us or a total stranger walking down the street or a cat sleeping on the tree or a flower waiting to be smelled. This light sometimes goes further, reaching people that can be unkind or cruel, in our looking saturating their being with its warmth. And then it even reaches out further to non-living beings like the asphalt road or the door of the elevator or the spoon that you stir your soup with. I guess it’s all about intimacy that shines forth when all the defenses and resistances are let go of. This intimacy is so sweet. What we call love is that I believe. It’s always new and it’s always the same, waiting there to be recognized.
This recognition put me into tears yesterday when I was reading about the moment of the same type of recognition which was experienced by Rumi. In the book, the page was telling about the day when he suddenly stopped walking in the bazaar of Konya and started whirling with ecstasy in the middle of the street when he heard the rhythmic, even melodic sounds of the hammers of the goldsmiths working in their ateliers. Then when he is asked, he simply pointed to the truth that the source of human soul which is nothing but only Love resides everywhere. We don’t need to look far. It is there in the worldly ordinary everyday life that we can experience any time.
Congratulations for the birth of Holy Mischief! I am so happy to be here in this space with you and Filiz and other friends. Thank you for initiating this fertile, playful ground. I feel love, I feel embraced and I feel excited. A biiiig hug to you dear Debra.
❤️