I am writing this morning from a lounger on the porch overlooking the lake. The view is spectacularly relaxing and beautiful. It has been a long time coming, this view. I got here on Monday and it has done nothing but rain since then. Cold rain. I have trudged out in it every day, one day getting chilled and soaked to the bone. And today, it seems as though it was all a dream. The sunlight plays on the water and the birds chirp merrily and who would know that the weather has been a mean dream for nearly a week.
[clear]On the day I took the longest walk, the length of the beach, I happened upon an etching in the sand. It said “my love for you is without limit”, presented in a neat rectangle. Wow, someone proclaimed their love from the beach to the balcony. They were not playing it cool. And, well, love, by its nature, is not exactly cool. Lately, I have been joking with my students about something I have called “the love strategy”. The idea is that instead of “divide and conquer” i.e. “the war strategy”, one could choose to unify and simplify a.k.a. “the love strategy”. I’ve been talking to them about the way we often choose to diversify our efforts rather than consolidate them, covering our bases so to speak, a choice I am guessing is due to fear more than anything. A war strategy says we are always afraid, even paranoid. It fixates our attention on the things that we don’t want to happen. Where there is war, there are casualties. Love, on the other hand, focuses on what makes us feel warm, happy, blissful even. It fixates on, or craves something that either has happened that we enjoyed or that we imagine will feel good. Love says I am one with you, we are in it together. Love says we aren’t separate. If we love ourselves enough to listen to our own knowing, then we love others enough to be willing to share our knowing. Where there is love, there are chocolates!
I go to the beach to see the vast water and lose myself in stretches of sky and sand. For me, there is nothing like a view of the ocean and the horizon to restore a sense of balance and space to my life. I am staying this week at the Meher Spiritual Center in Myrtle Beach. I can’t see the ocean from here, for the lake and the trees, but, somehow, it is still all about the view. Meher Spiritual Center was founded by Meher Baba, a man some have called “love personified”. Seems like a good place for a little research on “the love strategy”. He loved in silence, he didn’t use his vocal cords for something around 50 years of his life. Many people still feel deep love for him and it is clear from the pictures everywhere here that he loved the people and this place. He loved the poor, the sick, the beautiful and the ugly. The view, you could say, was love whatever appears to you, in whatever way you can, as an expression of the divinity in us all. Clearly this is the “unify” part of “the love strategy” in action. If we view others as reflections of our own knowing and our perception of them a result of that unity, then it is easy to love them. But, if we view others as obstacles to our own knowing, the view gets very cloudy indeed.
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Maintaining the view, when the world becomes detailed and complex, when the dishes pile up and the floors are dusty, when the clothes need washing and the shoes are lost, when the rain makes the world dark, this is the hard but simple work of love. “Simple can understand complicated, but complicated cannot understand simple” says Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche. “Simplify” being the second directive of “the love strategy”, I use this quote a lot. How can we simplify the situation? How can we find the one thing that will loosen the knots, clear the way for movement? Usually, for me, this means returning to the view, returning to the way we see things from a place of unity. Sometimes, that means I have to step back, take the perspective of sky and ocean, big space. Other times, it means I have to stay right where I am and look closer at what is actually there. Like here on the porch, for instance.
