Let Love Live, Revisited: Will We Act to Strengthen the Caring Relationship We Call a Community and Hope to See Actualized in Our Nation?

I’m sure you, too, are amazed at scenes like this: You’re watching your child at play, or a puppy running around the yard. Or you’re walking in the woods and see a fawn, or a kit, a baby fox, or a butterfly.

Or—I’m sitting in bed, a magazine on my lap. My wife is next to me, doing a puzzle. In between us, near our feet, are two cats, sleeping. I look at them, at all of us, and feel awe. Ok, the cats are simply sleeping, my wife, puzzling. But there is such trust on that bed. These beings want to be here, with me, with each other. They care. Or we care.

One of the cats, Miko, starts shaking, as if dreaming. He wraps his front paws around and over his head, as if to hide. I lean over and touch his back, and the shaking stops. He relaxes, releases his head, and turns over, showing me his belly. There is such vulnerability there, and tenderness. I give myself to you, and you give it back, enhanced.

When life is tough, we need to know such moments are possible, and even better, how to create a situation so they’re probable.

I’m reading an article in Lion’s Roar: Buddhist Wisdom for Our Time. The piece details a wonderful conversation between author and meditation teacher, Sharon Salzberg, and the educator, scholar and social activist Bell Hooks, about “The Power of Real Love.” Sharon talks of growing up and thinking that love is something given by others, but instead, it is an ability, a capacity, maybe even a responsibility we have in ourselves. Bell Hooks talks of love as residing in our actions, not just in our feelings.

In this day, in this threatening political climate, where fear and hate are so frequently in the news—How do we love? How do we allow ourselves to be vulnerable and care when the forces of domination and injustice seem to surround us?

Fear can be a message to wake up and observe more closely, or to turn away and flee. It’s built on opposition and is unstable and lasts only as long as we maintain a threat, an enemy, and a wall. Those outside the wall are rejected; those inside the wall are suspect. Such fear needs our compliance with it to succeed. Sometimes, we must or can’t help but act out of fear, but we pay an awful price when we allow fear to live too dominantly in us.

Love is built on mutuality, on approaching as close as possible to another being. It thrives on moments when there is little or no boundary or wall and, as the philosopher Ken Wilber put it, when our borders are not just points of demarcation but places where touching is possible….

 

*To read the whole piece, please go to The Good Men Project.

 

**And thank you to Bell Hooks and Sharon Salzberg (and Lion’s Roar) for the conversation and teachings.

***This is a revisiting of a blog from September, 2017.

 

Mystery and Presence: Feeling that Creates Understanding

I am sitting on my deck, feeling a slight breeze, and watching the play of sunlight and shadow on the trees and flowers that surround the lawn. It is early morning. A statue of a Buddha under a rhododendron bush is just uphill from the deck. Two cats, Milo and Max, sleep near to me. I feel a sense of peace, and privilege, even mystery, that I can be here, that this exists, that these cats want to be with me. Their lying here with such trust is somehow baffling to me, even though they have been with me for years.

 

The philosopher Jacob Needleman tells a story in his book, The Indestructible Question: Essays on Nature, Spirit and the Human Paradox, about how, when he was young, he met a renowned authority on the traditions and culture of China. The man was regularly consulted by governments, linguists, mapmakers, and even people seeking spiritual advice.

 

Needleman, at the time, was a delivery boy. He entered the scholar’s office to deliver and collect library books and found it piled high to the ceiling with books, papers, arcane documents, and diagrams. It was like a small library from another time and place. As he stared around the room, he accidently knocked to the floor an old book, which fell open to an illustration of the human body with strange symbols surrounding it. He bent over, somehow drawn to study it. In the midst of speaking a magical Taoist incantation, the scholar noticed where Needleman was staring, and stopped what he was doing.

 

“Shut that book,” he said by way of a greeting. “Do you know what journalism is?”

 

“Certainly,” Needleman replied, as he looked up.

 

“There are three, maybe four books in this whole room that are not journalism,” that do not merely repeat what other people have said or done. “But all the rest, including that one on the floor, are journalism. … I am practically at the end of my life. I know more about Chinese religion than maybe anyone in the world. …Yet, the most important thing I don’t know. Because I have never felt the tradition” or know what it means to practice it.

 

“I have only begun to recognize this. In order to know what one knows, one must feel.”

 

We might think that understanding is just about rational thought. But rational thought travels on a road laid out for it by feeling. Daniel Siegel, MD, and professor of psychiatry at UCLA, describes phases in the process of constructing emotion. The first phase is the “initial orienting response.” It is pre-thought and can be relatively unconscious. Our bodies are jolted to pay attention and feeling is born. The second is about appraisal, attuning and connecting, using feeling to label stimuli as good or bad, pleasing or dangerous. Memories are aroused. We construct meaning, thoughts, and want to approach or avoid someone or something. Our experience then differentiates into full emotions like sadness, joy, fear and love….

 

*To read the whole article, please go to The Good Men Project.