Love
Love blinds the surest among us to all our certainties. Love blurs the edges and distorts the image of what you thought to be real, recreating it in the image of the very thing’s essence. Love changes how you see things and makes that clearer. It can’t transform you, but it can transform how you know, and so, what you know. Love defines things out of thin air, but erases all the definitions you thought you could rely on; it puts things in perspective so they inevitably look distorted to you. Love makes what is real appear as it is, indescribable, without the hard edges you put there, and in its core, benign and painless. Love can’t lead you to itself; it calls your name but you have to look for it. It needs you but not as a thing it craves, only as a part of its very definition, an essence the same as its essence. Love can have no urgency, it can have no spiked words, it cannot be unkind; but you will have to learn something new about kindness to understand this. You will have to know what is really meant by hardness and why it is merciful sometimes to be penetrated. Love will get inside you because you have no solid boundary, you are porous in every way and love seeps in, filling you up from the inside as much as from the outside. Love lies in wait for you and will consume you with certainty as soon as you encounter it. Your death is assured because love will slay you; you will give in eventually to that embrace. Love hands you the keys to heaven, it wants you to have paradise, it even knows that you deserve it. But love can’t make you enter that kingdom; you can stay in your illusions if you wish, though they rightly be called “hell.” And love cannot damage you, but one day it will destroy you and leave no trace, no carnage. Love kills like that, like a clean beheading, and all identity gone; and then, at that precious moment, all there is is love, there is no you and no story and nothing up ahead. There is love backwards and forwards in space and time, in every direction, permeating every being, every thought, every bit of dust that you walk on and which you breathe. Love is all there ever was. To keep the truth as simple as possible, I can say just this one thing: Love is all there ever was.
07.23.08