Spiritual Sundays | Twenty
Unconditional Love
Dear Friend,
Today I’ve been working with Ash Grey, a musician friend from Texas. We’ve been writing together. We started on a song that’s been around me for years now. Over that time it’s been revealing itself. I’m a little exhausted because the song took me to a place I didn’t want to go. Missing our dear old Santy.
The way that she loved me. I just can’t love myself like that. For me it speaks of the core dilemma we face as humans. How hard it is to accept unconditional love, the love that the divine has for us.
We hold it off.
It’s not that we are not loved unconditionally, deeply and eternally. We think we have to deserve it. Those of us who seek contact with the divine, we are so aware of our faults and short comings. The voice of the false self keeps score of the mad ideas we harbour but in Santy’s eyes there was only love.
She saw me as I am. This will only sound strange to anyone who’s not experienced the impossible closeness of the bonds we form with our animal friends.
To look at ourselves through the eyes of love, we must for a time see into the darkness.
It takes courage and faith to see how we refuse ourselves.
We’re afraid to do it, because to do so means we face the end of who we think we are. The false self. Its last refuge is in the places we refuse to look.
To accept that we are loved without conditions and beyond measure, is humiliation for the false self.
The song as it was, was a nice idea and poetic and moving and when we found ourselves dissatisfied with it, Ash kept going. Trying new chord sequences and melodies. Improvising lyrics as place holders, half caught ideas and me resisting inwardly. My false self wanting to take a break, to turn away and then the words began to take form and my pencil scribbled them on the song sheet. .
I thought of a poem by Mary Oliver that deals with the impossible task of loving what is beautiful and lovely and will not last. I miss Santy so much I don’t allow myself to feel the full force of it, and then the song took me there and I saw something Santy had come to teach me. Being present, fully in the moment without a false self of her own, she was a conduit for the love that defies the logic that we must somehow perfect or excuse ourselves to be loveable.
The love she shared with me and Chiara has not gone from the world.
It’s always here.
Beneath it all.
All of it.
The madness and the honour.
Disarmed and vulnerable, bemused and clinging to certainty, the simple realisation that love is real. Anything ‘not love’ is a delusion. These games our minds play on us. Dogs have no time for it.
We are only love.
We come from love.
When our time is done, it is to love that we return.
Our task whilst here is to realise this love and allow ourselves to be healed.
Which means to surrender all that is untrue.
Not something the false self will do and yet it has no choice.
We must choose.
The artist Pink, played a show at the Tottenham stadium yesterday. On my way to meet Ash I walked through the crowds of fans making their way to the concert. Many were wearing pink, some with those “Choose Love” t-shirts you see in the shops.
Choose love.
Move past the taunts of the false self.
Meet yourself as you truly are.
A child of the divine.
Forgive the faults you see in others.
Forgiveness prepares the way for the love that is here for all of us.
It’s not easy.
Thankfully we have our animal friends to help us on our way.
Till tomorrow.
Love
Mikey