A Love That Liberates

I can’t name or point to one particular event or moment when I sensed it, or remembered it. Remembering is the closest word to try to describe it. It’s like remembering a memory of something I once knew completely, experienced directly, and yet somehow also completely forgot about, completely forgot not just that I experienced it but that it ever existed.

I’m going to try to describe it, because I’m already convinced that I can’t. And I love the dare of a hard to reach place. I love to try to use words in the effort of reaching the places where words end. As if my sentences could end, and then the energy that was held within them, held as if each word could be an itty-bitty boat; and when the sentence ends, I might still carry you somewhere.

I might still carry you to the thing itself, out beyond words, and the voice they contain, to the actual experience of what I am trying to describe. An innermost thing, a place that’s often described as mystical because what other word can be used. Mystical almost gets us there. But it’s more. Plus, mystical is highly misunderstood as then being something that’s separate from us, from what’s human. So, let’s not call it mystical. Let’s just call it the heart.

And in the heart, there’s a love that liberates.

I felt this electric thrill the first time I came across D. H. Lawrence’s description of “the body’s body,” because I knew what he meant. Without understanding it entirely. Without it entirely making sense. It made more sense to me. The body’s body. It somehow described to me something truer than saying the body. Or deeper. It felt like the experience itself of the body, not all that I impose or want or desire or expect of the body. It’s just the body’s body.

In the same way, the heart has a heart within it. And the heart’s heart isn’t human. Or it isn’t human in the way we’ve come to understand what it means to be human. In the heart’s heart there’s just unending, unmitigated, unspeakable light.

Unspeakable because no one can actually say where that light comes from, or they might say, and claim to know this, but in truth, that light cannot and can never be fully named. This is what makes it sacred. The ultimate unknowable part about it. Some call that part mystery. I call it reverence.

The light in the heart’s heart is a love that liberates.

What most of us have known, what I have mostly known, is a love that claims. A love that possesses and seeks to own. A love that’s terrified it will end. A love that tries to control. A love that wants to change what it loves. A love that has ardent roots in the ego. A love that is in fact not love at all. But we can call it love, because for most of us, it is all we have ever known.

And it’s not that it isn’t love. Or I don’t feel I have the right to say that, the right in fact to say anything about the ways we’ve tried and failed and tried again to love with our love that isn’t really love at all. Because it’s so tragic and so gorgeous. And so brutally what it means to be here. To try with our egoic love again and again to love until we shatter enough until we reach the thing itself.

We break enough or so completely that we recognize that desire to control, that desire to have and to hold, that desire to possess, to claim, to always have by our side, that this isn’t and will never be the thing itself. The thing itself is here, with or without the ego. The thing itself is here in the heart’s heart. And it doesn’t claim. It doesn’t own. It just radiates. Because it’s not and has never been and will never be ours. It’s shared with us from within us. It’s shared with us for us to then share.

And that is all.

This is the love that liberates. And where it comes from, I don’t know. And I don’t know but I also don’t believe those who tell me they do. Or I believe them but with a grain of salt. I believe them but with my own mustard seed. I believe them but I trust more my own direct experience of it.

And why do we forget about it, I don’t know. Why do we not only forget our own experience of it but also the fact that it exists at all. I don’t know. I just know that when I remember it, when it floods me, as if from the marrow of my bones, as if from within the blood stream, when the love that liberates, liberates me it’s the truest thing that has ever existed. It is the thing itself. And time stands still, or never really was, or maybe it’s just that nothing can compete with this truth, nothing can exist as intensely in any moment as this love, including me. When I reach the heart’s heart, I am somehow nothing more and nothing less than it.

And that is all.

With only more love,
​M.