We Live Inside Love

     

“We live inside love, there is no outside, only forgetting….”

Many years ago I went to an art sale where my dear friend Jan Gibson was selling her work. I knew her as a poet and as the leader of a rock band.  I knew that she created art out of whatever she found and I knew I loved her and her work, but I had no idea how this one item would repeatedly come to me as a life lesson and blessing. What I found there that day was a small wooden table filled with images painted by Jan and titled a “Transformation Table.” I loved the painting that covered this small table, trees and leaves and birds, but I’m also a word person and found that what brought me again and again to pondering this piece of art was the poem Jan had painted onto its surface.

I haven’t seen Jan for years, though she remains dear to my heart and I’d love for this posting to lead me to her again. I don’t know where else this poem lives besides on the table in our living room, but I know it needs to be in our world today and I find myself hearing it more and more deeply. I often need to remind myself of it, though just as often it sings to me whenever I listen.

“We live inside love

There is no outside, only forgetting

A Spirit lover calling each to a long and holy purpose

A big event is waiting to be born

We and this earth are to be fully created

Hear these messages:

The wind blows love

The leaves elect love on every glowing branch

A great migration will soon occur

The stars, sun, all the heavens, the earth belongs with shining love messages, inspiring us, reminding us of who we are

Choose love and by your choosing

You will stand transformed

By the presence of love which has always surrounded us!”

Do any of these lines speak to you as they do to me?

Sometimes this Love statement becomes a cry, a prayer, a hope not yet realized.  I might believe in it, but I know that children are still separated from their parents at our borders. I know that poverty robs people of basic human rights. I know that racism is a poison at the heart of our culture and that homophobia and transphobia rob us of relationships and endanger our lives. I know that guns and words still kill and that illness eats away at people we love every day. And I know there are more evils that threaten our world. So where is the Love? How do we see all these things and not despair? What inspires you/us to work for justice-love? What is my/your piece to sew in making a quilt of love that covers all of us? How can we work together to bring the love vision into ordinary reality?

We are in the midst of so much turmoil and pain in our nation, in our world, in our personal lives, yet this love truth also exists weaving its way through it all.  Sometimes I see the leaves “on every glowing branch.” Sometimes I see flowers growing from a gutter on a dilapidated roof or out of a seemingly barren rock. In Ireland, I saw a tree growing inside an ancient monastery, reaching far beyond where there had once been a roof, reaching for the light. I have to remind myself when those I love are suffering that even then “we live inside love, there is no outside,” and pray that I and we will not forget, that we will know deeply that we are not separate from Love, that we will somehow “choose love” and find ourselves transformed.