Love Bhakti #13: Where Love Goes

Where love goes, I will go too.

Lead me ever deeper into the heart of the heart, along the curving spiraling path towards the spark that is the secret soul of the world. I will follow your twirling steps into these woods and never look back. Lure me onward. The truth behind the symbol of the sailors’ death is that the sweetness of the siren’s song is the ultimate union with all things. To those who put wax in their ears there is only the horror of mortality and a loss of will, but to the lover it is the deepest instinct, the ultimate quest pursued without regard for the fragile limits of one incarnation, not a literal drowning but a willing sacrifice of ego for the chance to merge with the ocean of spirit.

It has never been safe.

I cannot keep up if I am armed and shielded. I must leave them behind, all the warrior’s trappings, the illusion of control; I will run to you unencumbered and bold, unhesitating, clothed in desire and with my face painted only with the radiance of your kiss. Love, I hold out my arms to be filled with you. Every glimpse of you (like sunlight through leaves) burns away everything that is not you. The cup does not shield itself against the wine. Fill me and I will never again be afraid of you. This self is fragile as glass, blown into being by unseen lips and made for you. When others look at me, let them see through this delicate life to the glow of your ruby heart.

My every step follows on the heels of Love. For those who are hopelessly, hopefully in love, the Beloved is everywhere. Everything is a reminder of this relentless passion, this infinite desire. Love, you look at me through the eyes of a passing stranger and whisper to me in rising storm winds. You are elusive as a hint of perfume and solid as the ground I walk towards your embrace. Everything makes me think of you. I save every moment to tell you about when we are together again. Everything I am, or do, or will become, I lay as roses in your lap for the light of one smile.

Ruth said, do not ask me to turn away from you; let me live and die with you, and call your God my own. Love, wherever you lodge, I will find a home; those who love are my caravan in this journey to you. The Beloved that sings in you is the refrain of my own heart. I place my feet into the shape of your steps, though they lead to deeper places than I have ever known.

Where you go, Love, I will go too.

Love Bhakti #12: Unchained Melodies

The native people of Australia tell a creation story of ancestral spirits who emerged from the dream that preceded this reality, and walked through this world singing everything into being. Each of our lives, to the core of our physical being, softly echoes the verses of our unique naming-song, the span of our days counted in the measures of heartbeat and breathing, the melody of voice and laughter harmonized with yawn and sigh and growl, the syncopation of our steps bridging the movements of our existence.

Music is inseparable from life. In its earliest forms, dating back before recorded history, music may have been humanity’s stylized imitations of birdsong and animal call, wind and storm. Anthropologists and ethnologists are hard pressed to think of any documented example of a human culture that does not include some form of music. It seems to be as integral to our ability to communicate and form societies as language.

Music is inseparable from spirit. Myths from all over the world describe music as a gift of the gods, or a secret stolen from them; even the word “music” has divine origins in the Greek Muses. Religious traditions have their sacred music, often carefully bound by rules to keep it pure and sublime, given in ceremony as offering and praise to deity. Composers throughout time have drawn inspiration from the world of spirit, expressing through music those things of the soul that are beyond all words.

Love Bhakti #11: One Hand, One Heart

I write this Love Bhakti as a gift to, and in honor of, two people whom I love dearly and who are family of my heart if not of my blood.

These two were married this weekend, on a perfect clear day in the company of their loved ones. I was given the great privilege of being one of the two people to perform this wedding, and it’s an honor that will never fail to amaze me and fill me with joy. The ceremony came, as so many do, as a reward and something of a relief after a long process of work and planning and stress, excitement and disappointment and anticipation and hope.

Love Bhakti #10: The Secret Garden

In this day and age, we tend not to have a healthy relationship with the concept of secrecy; its connotations are almost entirely dour or negative. And yet, for all that it has a bad rap, there’s a beauty to secrecy, a wild and shadowed footpath barely discernible through the deep forest of our innermost lives, leading to places unreachable by more conventional means.

One of our universal traits as human beings is that we are each the tabernacle of the secrets we carry. No one, no matter how frank and open they consider themselves to be, is ever completely revealed to the world.

Love Bhakti #9: A Critical Need

In my last Bhakti, I touched on the need we each have to satisfy our survival-level needs for sustenance, safety, love, and esteem before we’re able to function at our highest potential. Love is necessary to each of us if we’re to fully bloom into the people we are meant to be.

If this is true for each of us, it is equally true for everyone else in the world as well.

There are many crises in the world today, many terrible and desperate and frightening situations. Most of us are emotionally affected by these and feel a longing to do something about it; and much of the time these responses are accompanied by a sense of overwhelming helplessness– “I am one person, with more demands on my time and more responsibilities than I can manage. What can I do that will even matter?”

Love Bhakti #8: The Universe Loves You And Wants You To Be Happy

Pretty goofy idea, huh? I mean, don’t most major belief systems teach us that life is suffering and hardship? Or, at the very least, a purgatorial state to be endured with strained patience until we die and move on to something better?

(You’d think, if that were true, that we wouldn’t be so thoroughly hardwired to avoid death at all costs! But I digress…)

So what’s up with this hippie pronoia crap about a benevolent Universe that wants us to…feel good?

Love Bhakti# 7: The Hardest Thing You’ll Ever Learn, Pt. II

I remember very vividly one session of my acting class when I was 16. It was a time when I was making a lot of breakthroughs both personally and as a performer, when I’d started studying occultism, and I was beginning to come into my own after so many years of awkwardness and uncertainty.

The teacher, wanting to teach us to connect to our emotions by the use of tangible symbols and sensory recall, had us bring to class an item to which we felt very deeply connected for some reason. We went around the class and described the item and why it was so meaningful to us. Everyone else brought something that had belonged to someone else, or been a gift. I brought my first pair of dance shoes, a pair of Capezio jazz shoes, the soft flat lace-up kind, that I’d gotten when I was nine and which I could still wear (probably could now, too). They’d been spray-painted silver for a show, and written on in idle moments. They were battered and worn, the paint rubbed off in spots, permanently molded to the shape of my feet.

I could describe what was meaningful about them, easily. But then the teacher went around again, and wanted each of us to hold our item and talk to the person we identified with it. It was incredibly powerful, everyone speaking with such raw honesty, so intimately, with pain or joy or love or anger or all of them mixed.

When it came my turn, I was stumped. My mom had bought me the shoes, but I didn’t identify them with her. No one came to mind.

My teacher had the answer. “Talk to yourself,” she said. “Talk to your nine year old self who has just gotten these shoes, and tell her whatever you want her to know.”

Love Bhakti #6: The Hardest Thing You’ll Ever Learn, Pt. I

One of the most common lines of questioning that comes up anytime I discuss my ideas about sacred romance with someone revolves around the idea of self-love, and particularly, how the path of the Lover might lead a wayfarer on it to reach a state of loving themselves.

I admit that this was something I was not terribly concerned with at first, and perhaps short-shrifted in the process. It was work I had largely completed for myself over many exhausting years, and I was much more curious now about the applications of sacred romance to the world around me, and my movements within it.

Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world.
~~Lucille Ball

I also admit to having had some impatience with the idea of contemplating ways to achieve self-love, because it has become a pet peeve of mine that so much of modern spirituality seems to be mired in unbelievable narcissism, so focused on discovering one’s inner child or wild woman or whatever the current trendy archetype is, spending thousands of dollars on expensive retreats and fancy props for the sole purpose of cultivating a hip, worldly sort of spiritual virility while still sneering at the homeless guy on the street or driving away from the scene of an accident. (It’s not the spending of money, the desire for retreat, or the toys themselves I object to– they can be as meaningful as anything else. It’s the yuppified sense that spirituality can be bought as simply as a house, a good education, or a collection of wine that sets my teeth on edge.)

Love Bhakti #5: A Romantic Life

When I first began exploring sacred romance as a spiritual path– before I even really had a vocabulary with which to name it– there was a seeming paradox that I struggled to understand.

On the one hand, whenever I spoke to anyone about my thoughts and ideas around sacred romance, about bringing beautiful love energy into the world, they would almost invariably react like a desert traveler spotting an oasis, as though the world were parched and romance was water.

On the other hand, romance *seemed* to be everywhere. As a culture, we can’t get enough of it. Love in some form is probably the single biggest subject for modern music. The majority of TV shows and movies, if they aren’t specifically about love stories, feel the need to include romantic subplots whether they make sense or not. Magazines are choked with articles about finding, keeping, maintaining, and recovering from romance; and romance novels are a huge and thriving industry. We use romance to sell everything from diamonds to dish soap, rate restaurants in part based on whether we’d take a date there, and despite that it’s now perhaps more acceptable to despise Valentine’s Day in a sort of weary and jaded fashion, at the same time millions of people still throw themselves with almost a frantic need into an orgy of roses, champagne, and french-milled cliche.

Love Bhakti #4: Hopelessly Devoted

I’ll never forget the first time I was conscious of being attracted to another woman.

I was probably about 18 or so, and had driven down for the weekend to Rutgers to visit the curious world of college life and a couple of my high school friends currently living it. We were making our way to a round of frat house parties, but had stopped at one of the student centers to hear someone’s band playing in the basement.

I can’t remember a thing about the band anymore. But I remember, vividly, sitting in the back on a wide windowsill, hugging a knee to my chest and chilling out, when I caught sight of a girl amongst the dancers. She was petite, as delicately built as a pixie, and in fact that’s what I called her in my head, the Pixie. She had on the long tiered skirt and oversized shapeless sweater of your average arty hippie college chick, and long pale cornsilk hair in an unhindered fall down her back, with Bettie Page bangs over beautiful features. She danced so unselfconsciously, swooping in circles and swishing her hair, Doc Martened feet keeping rhythm on the floor, dancing in the joyful uninhibited way children do when they don’t know anyone’s watching.