Eternal love is
impersonal,
and
like the ocean that drowns a sunken city,
it fills all rooms without being contained by any.
The heartbreak of personal love,
is the suffering that greases the wheel of time,
and that deathless yearning:
the momentum of desire that keeps it turning.
Love is eternal,
like the Light of awareness,
while the fluctuating patterns of form,
like the shifting sands of time,
are only ever temporary,
like the blossom of a flower,
or the beauty of youth.
The heartbreak of personal love is God’s holy sword,
for all love bound to form,
is bound to end with that form,
and all forms do end:
all experiences change and vanish away.
Joy and Love that depend on outer experience are indeed bound:
chained to rise up like a puppet,
or sink like an anchor,
with the appearance and disappearance of forms.
Love that is beyond and prior to experience,
is free, permanent, and our true nature.
Yet, do not shun personal love.
To shun personal love,
so as to avoid that perennial human heartache,
is to plant a seed too shallow:
is the live but half-incarnate.
Awareness is wide, open, like a patient embracing sky
that watches life and death and spring and winter
cycle endlessly through its open heart.
Live deeply rooted in loving compassion
for the loam of human consciousness:
to celebrate personal love as it blossoms in all its imperfection,
and see in its unlasting fruit,
that life’s eternal metamorphosis,
is the blissful rippling of that One eternal ocean:
To love as mortals is no curse,
we are the many blossoms of the eternally blossoming tree of life.
Eternal newness that richly costumes,
this eternal present moment,
and the reflection of love eternal,
the miracle of self-aware existence.
So great souls returning,
from the peaks above the tide,
must relearn all unlearning,
and like simple farmers tend,
to the humble fruits of life.