LOVE AND THE FIRES OF TIME
It’s now early 2012, and remnants of an old song float out of nowhere into my mind:
“It’s life’s illusions I recall,
I really don’t know life at all.”
Ah, Time. The wistful remembrance of times past is ushered into our minds more and more as we age. That’s the beauty of Time; we get to see how Time changes all our questions. They get much more precise, much more pointed. Or at least not so point-less. We make room for those larger questions like: “What is life really all about?” And the question-behind-the–question – “who am I …really?”
Fires in Time bring us inexorably to the Timeless.
Sooner or later, in the life which we think is personally ours to have and to hold, we come to grips with the slippery nature of Time. Oddly enough, that coming to grips happens when we let go.
We let go of knowing. We let go of ever having known. And we come into a clear place we’ll call Unknowing. From there, we see that life has never been about a separate and distinct Me and You, but about the one living spirit we are.
Time has a way of clarifying, of restoring fundamentals like reality. Relationships, careers, money – even health, fade and fall constantly away in the fires of Time.
While the smoke still hangs in the air, a new, familiar but strange awareness emerges. Call it God or Spirit, Consciousness or Buddha–whatever you like. These days, I like to call it “Love”.
Love is a constant leaving.
Love is not something we learn, achieve or arrive at in time, like some kind of destination. Love is a constant falling action. To be in “love” we allow the transformation of a personal self-will into an impersonal and intimate willingness -a leaning into whatever life presents exactly as it is presented.
This Love has no investment in outcomes; it is a constant letting go…a constant leaving of thoughts and feelings formerly trucked in from the past. And a constant leaving of all future becoming.
The agent of all this is not our personal intention, or even some form of directed spiritual attention. We simply open up and allow love. We let it happen by letting our personal ideas and ideals slip away into irrelevance. We settle willingly into Source, into Self. Like the old Chinese proverb “a tree will fall the way it leans”, we open to love through loving. In truth, in time, we’re all destined to fall in love.
I hear bells ringing that no one has shaken,
inside “love” there is more joy than we know of,
rain pours down, although the sky is clear of clouds,
there are whole rivers of light…
– From Kabir with thanks to The Nonduality Highlights
