The responsibility of love
This question of the responsibility of love continues to live in me. I wrote a comment at Dave Pollard’s blog that captures another facet of it:
Love IS a social issue and engaging in the world with love is a bit of a trick. It not only accelerates innovation and “better”, it is a double edged sword too. I think there is such a thing as “the responsibility of love” which refers to the way we wield the weapons of the heart in the world when we are working in the territory of open heartedness. When we choose to love, we choose to elevate and commit to certain things above other things – people, paths, choices, directions. There is pain associated with this choosing, made all the more stinging by the fact that we choose and exclude out of heart-felt action, which is action we are fully committed too. It results in pain, and so much of the world that is created by love is also full of grief.
Love and pain, bliss and grief are siblings in this world. If we choose to work with love, we enter this polarity. We may also choose to work with complete dispassion and equanimity, which is what the Buddha invited us to do. My path is not that refined yet. I still choose the path with heart, and that means the path of pain also.
Oh, I’m glad you reposted this here.
I don’t think the Buddha ever promised a life without pain. The equanimity involved is merely the equanimity of acceptance, which, to my mind, is exactly what you’ve expressed here: the understanding that love and heart are necessarily bound up with grief and pain. Personally, I wouldn’t so much put it as being a double-edged sword, but as an expansion of capacity. I’ve found, sometimes, that many of those who’ve suffered extraordinarily have a similarly extraordinary ability to love in a deep and ungrasping fashion.
I don’t know. I love the world so, so much, and there’s a terrible heartbreak that comes with that love and the understanding that so much in this place for which I care so deeply is dying… or, rather, so much is dying, just as so much is being born, but I will not be around forever to witness that ongoing cycle.
Can I leave a poem?
The Subject Tonight is Love
The subject tonight is love,
and for tomorrow night as well.
As a matter of fact,
I know of no better topic
for us to discuss
until we all
die.
– Hafiz.
Can you leave a poem? Never ask again…this space begs for poetry of all kinds to be scrawled across it.
Thank you Siona for these thoughts…I guess my take on the dharma teaching is in the context of the four noble truths (life is suffering, there is an end to suffering, suffering is rooted in attachment, here’s a path to get you there), the Buddha understood not only that there is pain in the world but exactly what the origin of this pain was. His teaching was to lessen one’s attachment to that pain. So where the source of that pain is stories of love or hate, he advocates for a middle way, the path of equanimity. I might have it wrong, but it isn’t to say that one needs to be desensitized to the pain and joy of the world to be on that path…indeed the compassionate heart sees that path clearly.
For me, that is my work probably, and in the meantime I find that I am deeply enmeshed in the love and pain of the world. Indeed, as Hafiz says, it is the conversation and engagement I have until I die. AND, Hafiz might also be inviting us to die, several times over in fact, in ways that bring us nearer and nearer to an enlightened state.
I’ll have to check out the reference from the Nuu-Chah-Nulth book I’m involved in, but those people know it as well, and the word for love includes the pain of longing and grief. ANd we love anyway…isn’t that interesting?
And Hobie says hi.
Chris,
Just wanted to take a moment- again- to say how much I enjoy your blog. It gives me joy, a smile, question marks, juice, a heartful fresh perspective on being fully engaged in the world…And when I picture you, it’s a composite from your blog posts: you either juggling or fiddling in an airport…warmly, raffi
Chris! Wow! I meandered onto your blog through a comment you left Dave Pollard. I found myself pulling up a chair and making myself at home. Thank you!
By the way: There is no love without pain. If you can not feel pain than you can not feel love.
Thanks for the thoughtful/provoking post Chris. I love this ongoing inquirey.
I think at the core – the polarities collapse and it is all love. There is increadible energy in that collapsing that feeds life. It can be a real gift to hold space for that for ourselves and others, over and over again.
I experience the responsibility of love to be to do the work I need to do to show up in the world, in life, in each moment and each relationship with as much clarity as I can. From that place – what ever needs to show up seems to show up right on time.
With love,
Caitlin.
I like the poem Siona posted so much that I have printed it out and stuck it on the wall next to my desk.