I continue to struggle with what love is. I hear I have to die to find out. I know what that means and part of me does not want to do it; sometimes does it, but does not want to fully take the plunge.
Surrender. This is what it means. The warrior's paradox. Die before you die. Be dead, be thoroughly dead. Die to know what love is. Today is a good day to die. Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.
Aha! My struggle is not with knowing what love is. My struggle is with surrender, with dying in order to love. I have the power to choose my death. What better choice than to die for love, to die so I can love, to die so that I am love. But that is not love, it is saving my own butt by becoming love.
I must simply surrender. No surrendering in order to. I surrender to the Love that breathes me, that beats my trembling heart. Complete surrender. This is love.
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i feel the warmth of love every time i cross paths with you! are we crossing over into death? it seems that i feel and see love with each sparkly piece of this vibrant, magical life. why do you speak of death as a necessity to experiencing love?
ReplyDelete~amy
Surrender to the Love that breathes me? That is a step further than I have taken surrender before. I did not realize it until I read your post a third time.
ReplyDeleteI have surrendered lovingly to the moment many tinmes before, and it works beautifully, but as you noted, I did so because I knew loving surrender to the moment was in my best interest.
But to surrender to the Love that breathes me, for no ulterior reasons, that will require something beyond "me". Something beyond my ego. As you said, this is Love. Is this also the death to which you refer?
Peace, my friend.
Would it be possible to achieve/experience "love" just by killing our ego, and hold on to our body a while longer (for the time being it is functioning pretty well, anyway)
ReplyDeleteSometimes I wonder if we tend to confuse ~ in terms of intensity ~ the death of our mortal passing with the "death before death." I followed one of the links you posted, George, and was taken by the stanza from the 8th century woman Sufi saint Rabia Basri, when she wrote:
ReplyDelete"So beautiful appeared my death -
knowing Who then I would kiss,
I died a thousand times before I died."
There is a sense of repeated and complete surrender in her words, a letting go in full confidence of the holiness that awaits each of us upon our physical passing. She speaks not one death before we die, but a thousand.
For me, that's a new and startling perspective.
Thanks as always, George, for your provocative post.