We are now ready to explore the third and final friendship - our friendship with each other. Mark Nepo says, that there are three intertwined and inseparable friends that we need to stay connected to if we want to live an awakened life - three friendships that we must listen our way into a: our friendship with everything larger than us (the work of being), our friendship with our experiences (the work of being human) and our friendship with each other (the work of love).
“In order to live in this world, you have to be truly and completely in love.”
- Rumi
There is a love which itself has the power to free the human heart. Many remarkable people live in testament to this love, even though they are held in jail cells and prisons, or suffer the harsh conditions imposed by poverty, racism, adversity, war, and occupation. The truth of this love is that, if we can be uprooted from our daily preoccupations and taken by direct experience into its presence, then a profound transformation is possible. Whoever arrives at this place looks at the world differently. The distinctions on the surface no longer exist. Here it is possible to suspend our certainties and touch something greater: the Spirit within us.
- Richard Rohr
How I LOVE people. I love how we root and bloom, how we twine around each other and reach for the light, how as far as we grow in the dark of the Earth is as far as we stand in the world. How being human, we are always charged with the vibrancy of a larger presence. How the complexity of our humanity mirrors this larger presence.
In truth, we mirror everything living as we climb and stumble our way up the mountain to the cliff of yes.
I recognize each person I come across because I am each on any given day. What matters is whether I shun those who bear my flaws or help them up; whether I turn away when this larger presence seems too strong or keep my birth-eyes open; whether I find a way to meet what is incomprehensible and somehow draw strength from it.
What matters is if we can make it to the cliff of yes and shout our secrets to the sky till Heaven is the song we choose to sing on Earth.
This raises a central question: What is the proper use of our will? How useful is it to insist that we can will things to happen, if we are seeds growing into roots and shoots breaking ground? What if will is how we give our all to that growth? What if will is the sacred gritty act of holding nothing back?
Perhaps this is the work of love: to hold nothing back. Brother David Steindl-Rast reminds us that I believe means I give my heart to this. Perhaps, despite our lists of dos and don’ts, belief is less about the assumptions or conclusions we enshrine as principles and more about our devotion to engage and listen to life.
Of course we don’t stay rooted in one place. And so, a paradox and challenge for every spirit born to Earth is how to inhabit a thoroughness of being wherever life takes us. This leads to a life of compassion, of being with other living things in a way that lets them grow. This too is the work of love.
Long ago, a disciple of Confuscius, Zi Gon, asked, “Is there any one word that could guide a person throughout life?” The master replied, “How about shu (reciprocity)? Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.”
This is another form of holding nothing back and giving your heart to another. This is one of the earliest voicings of the golden rule.
All of us are roots and shoots in the human garden. As far as we root in the earth is as far as we sprout in the world. Each of us destined to find our particular path to the light, so much depending on whether we choke each other or not along the way.
- Mark Nepo