My first opportunity to really take a break today, and my mind is flooded with heartache. Why is Jeffrey Thomas still ringing in my ears more than ten years past his death? “The love that you never shut up about simply doesn’t exist, and that’s why it is breaking your heart!” He spoke with matter of fact kindness, but I heard it with such violence. If it does not exist, then why does my heart ache for it so? Why am I so broken inside? A friend said last night that he felt that because he had been such a ghastly person, and was now on a path toward healing, that he felt on some level he deserved special consideration. As if to say that though we ourselves are merciless in our judgement of the world, we deserve special consideration for our intentions because the greater distance we have had to travel. I tell you I felt like he had pantsed me right then and there. I couldn’t have said it better. And yet, this suspicion that the love I have to give may never be matched, never truly received by anything more eligible than a vacuum, or a vortex where it may swirl and soak up all I have, leaving me dry as a twig at the foot of a great tree.

I turn to my teachers for guidance:

J. Krishnamurti On Love:
We are not loved because we don’t know how to love. What is love? The word is so loaded and corrupted that I hardly like to use it. Everybody talks of love - every magazine and newspaper and every missionary talks everlastingly of love. I love my country, I love my king, I love some book, I love that mountain, I love pleasure, I love my wife, I love God. Is love an idea? If it is, it can be cultivated, nourished, cherished, pushed around, twisted in any way you like. When you say you love God what does it mean? It means that you love a projection of your own imagination, a projection of yourself clothed in certain forms of respectability according to what you think is noble and holy; so to say, `I love God’, is absolute nonsense. When you worship God you are worshipping yourself - and that is not love.

Because we cannot solve this human thing called love we run away into abstractions. Love may be the ultimate solution to all man’s difficulties, problems and travails, so how are we going to find out what love is? By merely defining it? The church has defined it one way, society another, and there are all sorts of deviations and perversions. Adoring someone, sleeping with someone, the emotional exchange, the companionship - is that what we mean by love? That has been the norm, the pattern, and it has become so tremendously personal, sensuous, and limited that religions have declared that love is something much more than this. In what they call human love they see there is pleasure, competition, jealousy, the desire to possess, to hold, to control and to interfere with another’s thinking, and knowing the complexity of all this they say there must be another kind of love, divine, beautiful, untouched, uncorrupted.

Throughout the world, so-called holy men have maintained that to look at a woman is something totally wrong: they say you cannot come near to God if you indulge in sex, therefore they push it aside although they are eaten up with it. But by denying sexuality they put out their eyes and cut out their tongues for they deny the whole beauty of the earth. They have starved their hearts and minds; they are dehydrated human beings; they have banished beauty because beauty is associated with woman.

Can love be divided into the sacred and the profane, the human and the divine, or is there only love? Is love of the one and not of the many? If I say,`I love you’, does that exclude the love of the other? Is love personal or impersonal? Moral or immoral? Family or non-family? If you love mankind can you love the particular? Is love sentiment? Is love emotion? Is love pleasure and desire? All these questions indicate, don’t they, that we have ideas about love, ideas about what it should or should not be, a pattern or a code developed by the culture in which we live.
So to go into the question of what love is we must first ideals and ideologies of what it should or should not be. To divide anything into what should be and what is, is the most deceptive way of dealing with life.

Truly, I take deep comfort in the words of Krisnamurti. This idea that love is potentially the cure for all of human and earthly suffering is a beautiful one. The business of accepting that love simply is, unconditionally, and without regard for self, possession or reward is touching. An ideal for living without debate.

And yet, this would mean that I must turn the fires of my heart outward, disturb no dust on the surface of the lives I haunt, or brush with even so much as an eyelash; And forget myself entirely.

Good heavens.