Sign of Love # 48

Sign of Love     # 48                                                
This has been a time of much relinquishment, my mother’s passing, moving (again!)  and the subsequent release of job, community and friends.  Oh happy child who knows home!  
It is a tender, sad and hopeful time.  My practice supports me and has taught me how to not just look for the light, but embrace it in the most unexpected places.  Rendering the ordinary extra-ordinary and symbols potent portals.

Stepping out on the balcony after a torrential rain fall, I snapped a picture of the skyline.  A welcoming sign from my new home.  There is gold here, nectar in the form of brotherly love.  Philadelphia.

Symbols can be really powerful. They connect us immediately, unmitigated to our hearts bringing a spontaneous kind of deep knowing; igniting something intimate.  They are gifts that permit us to tell ourselves into the continuing story.  Weaving connection. 

When my father was getting ready to make his transition he told my mother that whenever she looked up in the sky and saw an airplane streaming white smoke behind it, she should envision him polishing the Milky Way for her, so that when she was ready, it would be brilliant and beautiful for them to spend eternity together.  My strong, beautiful, fierce mother just passed. Now when I look up in the sky and see that same white streak across the blue heavens I think of them together polishing the Milky Way for me.

Now I am the memory keeper.  Love is the glue.

Love is a lot like gravity.  It’s all around, we know this and take it for granted until we fall, lose our balance.  Then it’s, ‘oh there is this energy that supports and holds me’. So too with love, it’s all around. We swim in it.  When a potent carrier of that love leaves our presence we become more acutely aware of just what purpose and place they served, serve in our life.

Love is the one thing that transcends time and space that we can comprehend. We readily eagerly perceive this; even if we don’t understand that transcendence, we do experience it.  Its taste never leaves.  For me this is what is brought to being when a powerful symbol appears. 

Of course there must be some experience had for the symbol to ignite recognition.  The experience of our truest whole self, had in deep meditation, ignites love of the most profound sort.  Inspiring devotion to that which ignited its presence.  I say ignited because it is all around, always present but not always available.  Meditation is the practice that brings water from the well and nourishes all we do with the potent power of love.  Love is the result of a joining, it is unity, it is wholeness.  We come into this world as a literal breach in the self contained wholeness of the womb.  In meditation we return to the womb of the heart, we merge with the source of wholeness.  In this way then we are continually healed and naturally  love self.  Not in an egotistic or solipsistic manner, but love as its purest most complete expression of union with what has always been right here in the depths of the heart.

The gift of years of practice and study is that now when a symbol makes itself known to me, be it rainbow or white streak across a blue sky I am driven straight to my heart.  There the prior experience of time spent in the pulsing depths of being is stirred, and recognition flashes.  It floods my body-mind and spills out as the expression of love anew.

I will always think of my parents polishing the Milky Way when I glance up at the sky and see that white line of connection.  May this sharing connect us to one another and our common bond of humanity.  May it feed our natural desire to be more fully realized beings.   Meditate.  Stir the depths of your being and know love.
 
Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with heart and soul there is no such thing as separation.  ~ Rumi