We’ve all heard the saying that love is blind, but I’ve always thought that it was the opposite, that, in fact, love improves your vision. That’s why love makes people seem crazy. When you love people you see what you couldn’t or wouldn’t have seen otherwise. You see the light in them, the gold, the child, the person, the precious, and even the miracle and potential. I tend to think that it is this increased vision that makes love cause people to commit the most outrageous acts for someone that everyone else has cast aside.
When we don’t see through the eyes of love, we see the superficial. The superficial is scary. That is where competition is and disregard and cruelty.
In the world of the superficial we don’t see precious, we see obstacles or opportunities, danger or safety, victory or failure. This is the place of fear and self-defense and here we become more prone to violence. It is as though we are forever travelling in a dark alley where anything could fly out at us with every step. On some level we keep our weapons always at the ready, close at hand. We may even become the aggressors.
That, my friends, is a dark place, to say the least. Strange shapes lurk there. Monsters yawn from every crack, devils shriek from every crevice, and perverts gasp around every corner. As you trepidate through that dreary landscape you know that you’re alone, you’re on your own. If the shadows lunge you must fight, fly, or be lost. No one cares who you really are. You are either an obstacle or an opportunity. Self-preservation rules there, not love. Not a very joyful place.
That unjoyful landscape is the landscape more and more of us are traversing everyday. Our coworkers whisper, our friends are snide, our lovers are vague, and our families are at war. We find ourselves alone endlessly bridging the ever-widening gaps of the abyss that is separating us from love and the life we envision in our souls.
That place of love and life is where we dance and celebrate that vision.We can throw our heads back in joyful laughter because we aren’t afraid to look away from the ground to the sky, wide and blue or full of stars above us. Here, when your friend does well you feel ecstatic, excited. You saw the light, the creative genius, popping and firing, glowing and growing, pushing to be born and released into life. Your own joy increases when you get to be a part of your friend’s realization of that joy.
When we love, our pain decreases when the pain experienced by those we love decreases. This can make us heroes. We yearn and reach to ease that pain, release that prisoner, tear that oppressor from their frame. We become supernatural, not like we were when we were drowning in that alley. We can rise above, reach in, and pull the dying from the wreckage. We can heal with a touch and save with a word.
The superficial sees garbage or an enemy rolling out from behind the cans in the alley. Love sees a homeless man, a homeless child. Love approaches, and touches, and asks. Love transcends fear, foolishly, many would say.
But that love that dared, that transgressed, and transcended, is a light. It’s the one voice that asked and reached and maybe, then, led two, not one, hand in hand from that cold ground to a place of celebration, connection to life, infinite nature, soul’s vision sparking again toward possibility. Yaaayy! Head goes back in laughter. Yep, head goes back in happiness, and trust, and renewed faith in love’s increased vision.
I just heard the words “trust in your words”. They just came to me as a complete thought. I heard it more than I thought it. I have turned from those stories. I have come to see religion, all of that, as an overwhelming burden to the human species and to life in general. I admit, though, that when I hear something like “trust in your words”, Jesus comes to mind.
For someone like me, who’s journey has been to sense things for myself, the story of Jesus causes me to sense the events depicted in that story. I don’t always interpret the same things that are written in the bible. I feel, and see, certain different events unfolding other than what have been told. I am aware of dynamics that are not revealed in the telling. For example…
I sense that what Jesus was calling “God” was actually an ominous force in his life that had been betraying him from the beginning. In my sense and my vision I “see” a landscape that is sunny, open, and lifeful, but above, a dark cloud that covers the whole landscape where Jesus is. This dark cloud is static like. It is somewhat transparent and is always moving and kind of spinning, and I imagine that it talks to Jesus.
I believe that it called itself “God” and deliberately led Jesus to his degradation and ultimate demise because of Jesus’ ability to “see” through the eyes of love and therefore heal, save, and renew people. I believe that this cloud calling itself “God” was actually, for lack of a better description, the projected voice of the leaders of the time.
In a world where tyrants require masses of slaves and are willing to inflict any kind of suffering to ensure obedience and more enslavement, kindness between folks is a major threat. Healing is one of the tyrant’s worst nightmares because healing reminds people that they deserve to be well and maybe even to frisk in the sun and that they can regenerate. Kindness reminds people that they are loved, that love is possible, and therefore abundance is possible.
Kindness wreaks havoc on that divide and conquer thing because kindness always involves a connection between at least two living beings. That connection always involves the sharing of regenerative energy, be it food, a touch, a lullaby, or the soothing and wrapping of a wound. Kisses to the forehead have the word “you” in them. When average folks dare take their gnarled and calloused hands from pushing that wheel in order to reach to help the guy behind…well, the wheel stops turning if enough people do that.
Isn’t it interesting how so many of us are in a circumstance where our survival is dependent upon pushing that wheel but our lives our dependent upon taking our hands off of it. This is the scary message that Jesus preached. This is the lifeful landscape that Jesus saw. Basically his message was “Why must you push that wheel and push that wheel in fear that you’ll lose the crumbs that fall so sparsely from it to your mouth? Look, there’s fish in the sea and wheat in the field and it is yours.” “You are already here and this is already yours.”
I get a little flaky sometimes and tend to want to spell it “allready”, all ready. That’s what he meant. Unlike what religion so often and overwhelmingly preaches, Jesus did not believe in suffering. Jesus saw through the eyes of love, so he saw the folks around him for what they truly were – living people with fire and energy and potential living on a planet with the same attributes. All ready here. We are what we need to be now living where everything we need is infinite.
Tyrants don’t want you to see or remember that. Tyrants want you dependent upon them and they want you feeling shitty for being dependent upon them so that you will keep striving towards their dictates in order to maybe win some comforting relief of approval from them, maybe an extra crumb or two.
They want you to believe that they are the sole possessor of all things and therefore are the sole provider of all things. Many will rape, pillage, murder, and horde just to perch themselves upon that hill and they want you to have to do the same or acquiesce to them in order to survive. By the time you’re finished with this guy, you haven’t seen a green field or a sparkling river laugh and flow, even from the corner of your eye, for decades. You’ve forgotten who you are. Your skin from head to toe and from tip to tip has become so calloused and scarred and hardened to life that it would take a million tender touches to reach sensation.
Love already “sees” past that, all ready knows, reaches straight toward you, in there somewhere, and pulls you out. It is instinct. Love sees life and instinctively reaches to connect with it and realize it. Tyrants dread love. They know that love leads us back to the green fields, sparkling rivers, and blue skies where we truly live. Tyrants know that that place is where people are free to love each other and enjoy each other. Tyrants know that that would mean that the wheel would stop turning.
If that wheel stopped turning the tyrant would begin to slide from his diminishing hill, sinking, crashing, and sliding eventually into the sea, melting and spreading out into billions of little particles. Maybe, someday, that tyrant will come back as one of us.
That tyrant was the dark cloud that had kept the people below, en masse, groaning that wheel, around and around. That dark cloud that called itself “God” and led Jesus to his degradation and demise was that tyrant. Remember, folks, Jesus was human. He had been misled into listening to another’s voice, forgetting that he already knew the truth and the way. He forgot his very own message, which I will summarize in this way, “I am all ready, all right, here, now, I am.” He lost himself.
Tyrants are tricky like that. They take up a lot of space because they horde everything for themselves and roar a lot, stamping and ordering all sorts of atrocities and spectacles, so you forget the sun even exists. Jesus walked the journey that so many of us, if not all of us, including the tyrant, are walking. We are truth, love, life, all ready here, all right, here, now, we are, but we are being drowned, overwhelmed, by the shadow of the poor tyrant, stamping and roaring ever above and around us.
Love comes from where the green fields are, flows from where those laughing rivers are, and soars in from where those blue skies are. Love is where are lives are, that’s where we are, that’s where we live. We are hand to hand there with love, our friends, those who would ease our pain and help grow our life, our infinity, the ones we knew as we began to push that wheel, the ones we forgot as we calloused and became bound to the sound of the wheel.
You can hear me here shuffling beside you, you can see me here if you dare turn your eye from the wheel to me. I am falling here and losing strength and I don’t know who I am. I am in the dark and can’t see and your touch upon my arm could keep me sway, lead me out to safe ground.
The touch was felt, a voice was heard, the wheel continued to lurch. Suddenly a tug and down to the dark and muddy ground. In that cold and wet he heard breath, a voice, “I’ll get you out. I’ll help you”
Gnarling knees yanked and pulled forward awkwardly through the muck, further and further as the sound of the wheel faded gradually behind, and now and then he could see his own hands, murkily through the darkness. He could see them vaguely there pulling forward along the ground as though a cloud around him in the air was breaking up. Further and further on they crawled and never through that course did that touch leave his arm or that breath leave his side.
He kept his face forward until, as he could see his own hands clearer and clearer, he ventured to tempt his head towards his companion to catch a glimpse. It seemed like both hours and like moments when they reached the crossing. It was becoming less and less murky and they could see a light across, the sun vaguely streaking low through brush.
C. Villeneuve
Mottyl's Whispers 