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What’s carrying you?
The Practice:
Lived by love.
Why?
Feeling both the world and myself these days, one phrase keeps calling: lived by love.
Explicitly, this means coming from love in a broad sense, from compassion, good intentions, self-control, warmth, finding what to like, caring, connecting, and kindness.
Implicitly and more fundamentally, this practice means a relaxed opening into the love – in a very, very broad sense – that is the actual nature of everything. Moment by moment, the world and the mind reliably carry you along. This isn’t airy-fairy; it’s real. Our physical selves are woven into the tapestry of materiality, whose particles and energies never fail. The supplies – the light and air, the furniture and flowers – that are present this instant are available, whatever the future may hold. So too, is the caring and goodwill others have for you, the momentum of your own accomplishments, and the healthy workings of your body. Meanwhile, your mind goes on being while dependably weaving this thought, this sound, this moment of consciousness.
It’s hard to sustain a feeling of knowing the nature of everything. The brain evolved to keep our ancestors afraid to keep them alive. But if you look and look again, you can see directly that right now, and in every now you’re alive, you’re cradled by the world and the mind like a child carried to bed by her mother. This cradling is a kind of love, and when you trust it enough to soften and fall back into it, there’s an untangling of the knots of fear and separation. Then comes both an undoing of the craving that drives suffering and harm and a freeing and fueling love living through you and as you out into the world.
Imagine a single day in which you were often – not continuously, not perfectly – lived by love. When I try this myself, the events of the day don’t change much – but my experience of them, and their effects, improve dramatically. Consider this as a practice for a day, a week – or the year altogether.
More widely, imagine a world in which many people, enough people – known and unknown, the low and the mighty – were lived by love. As our world teeters on the edge of a sword – and could tip either into realistic prosperity, justice, and peace or into growing resource wars, despotism, or fundamentalism – it seems to me that it’s not just possible for a critical mass of human hearts to be lived by love. It’s necessary.
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