Today is Valentine’s Day. A day when the heart speaks, should speak, of felt love.
And not just of the personal — the love that flows between two people — but also, even more importantly, the throbbing intensity that should be felt between all people and the earth.
Over and over again I keep coming back to the question: “How shall we love before we have lost everything?”
Embedded in this question are the multiple questions I daily ask of myself: “How shall I love myself before I have lost everything? How shall I love others before I have lost everything? How shall I love this earth before I have lost everything?
The same can be asked of you. “How can you love before you have lost everything?”
The same can be asked plurally of us: “How shall we, as a society of humans, love each other and this earth before we have lost everything?”
Somewhere in the above mosaic of two photos is the answer.
In the foreground there is a path. A path we have to all walk faithfully to reach the blood red posts of the temple. A temple housing a simple wisdom of moon and stars painted on stones; stones brought by each of us up our life’s path; stones that themselves were shaped by countless eons of tidal flows.
The temple (built by artist Sally Horne) is a combination of skill, aesthetics, emotional outpouring and spiritual presence. It rests in the sensual body of nature. The two go hand-in-hand. There is not the one without the other.
Love comes quietly
finally
Drops around me
on me
in the old way.What did I know
thinking myself
able
to go alone
all the way.Robert Creeley
“The old way” is the way of the goddess. The divine She.
She, whose heart pulses through her body the Earth, awaits our love.
We cannot ever reach the temple alone.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I am attracted deeply to your question. I believe that we can love, before we have lost everything, by living in the new paradigm we know must come to be, if we are not to lose everything.
My question is: How can we all love one another, ourselves, our most beloved ones, after we have lost everything? I think that when we know that, we will not have lost everything.
I was in Tasmania in 2007 and again in 2008. I love Tasmania. When I first went there to visit, I felt I was coming home. It’s a magical place and a place to heal and reconnect with nature. While there Earth Mother rolled out the red carpet for me and I saw the exotic animals I’d only seen in picture books. The Southern Ocean displayed her big waves and I saw the magnificent sunsets and sunrises. I also came to Tassie to be with someone I deeply loved and wanted to build a life with this person but after three months it dissolved and left me in a million pieces. I came home to America to heal my wound. I gave up everything in America to be with this person and in the midst of losing everything I reconnected deeply with nature and all its glory. I also reconnected with my passion for hiking and thinking deeply of my connection with the Star people and most of all myself. So it’s a rebirth in many stages and to lose love is to learn to love all over — with thyself and with the blade of grass we take for granted. Thank you!