Hidden Good Fortune

      

I would like to humbly suggest, dear friends, that often our good fortune is very much present, peeking out at us from hidden corners, but unrecognized if we assume that it has to look a certain way. Birthdays are one point in a person’s year when a life can be accounted for, and yesterday such a day arrived for me, but my good fortune did not make its appearance in the way that we have been taught it should come. During these unusual lockdowned times, I have been leading a life of hermetic seclusion in a place that is unfamiliar to me, apart from family, friends and community. Which means that when a birthday comes, there are no friends or family in person to celebrate with, no party to attend, no gifts to gush over—none of the things we usually associate with birthdays.

And yet, I spent my day, apparently alone as I was, embraced on all sides by loving good wishes. I did not lack for anything, and the evidence of my obvious good fortune was all around. I marvel at what has been given to me, and those gifts will continue to arrive in abundance, without even asking for them.

One of these gifts is the willingness to look at things newly and openly, and to no longer to be bound by conventional norms. So, I have just mentioned the convention of what a birthday needs to look like, but knowing now that this convention need not hold true, what else have we been told that is not true?

For my age cohort, it is likely that there will be a few more birthdays, and then death will come. Normally this news is greeted with revulsion, denial and fear, but just as I have come to question the context of birthdays, I have also come to question a lot of other things, including the repeated myths of what death will be. I do not know what will happen when death arrives, but I know to be open to what I don’t know, and to be skeptical of what I have been told about what anything will be.

The best possible response to the unknown-ness of death is abundant life, richly lived. So, yes, aging, degeneration, decay, disease, death—richly lived and courageously received.

I wish for all great good fortune. May we flourish in our lives and be of benefit to ourselves and to others.

Saint Valentine's Day

 

   

* Love without reason or context or separate object. Love as the essential principle of our being. *

A day devoted to love . . . for indeed, isn’t it so that all of us all around the world want to love and be loved? Simply that: to love and be loved. Maybe the most fundamental of all desires, one that permeates human society and is evident to the bursting point in so many ways, especially today.

Valentine’s will be a day when the established beliefs surrounding love will be on full display, and restaurants, florists, resort hotels, chocolate shops and greeting card companies will see rich profits. Of course, there are also the wine distributors and video streaming services that provide the many bottles of Chardonnay and the unending entertainment diversions for the people alone at home tonight thinking that something is wrong.

Many unfortunate men who heedlessly overlook the very strict rules surrounding this day will be sleeping on the couch for a while.

If one is so inclined, a day like today is a brilliant opportunity to consider what actually is going on. What is “love” after all, and is the Hollywood and pop music version of love we have been taught to cherish in fact authentic? How has this come about, and why have things been so prominently expressed in the specific form of romantic love, as if it overshadows all other?

For me as someone who has not been partnered for, what, maybe 200 years now and without much motivation to change that, I feel that I have an outsider’s vantage on the whole parade. I want for the moment to put aside all of the conventional thinking and deeply consider these questions.

I want to see love not only in its objective form or as a mercantile exchange—“I will love you if you love me,” but love as a fundamental attribute that is not generated or induced. Love without a reason, love as the essential ground of being of who we truly are, love as another word for the inherent attraction of subatomic particles and the unified field of the universe. Love not as a merely human domain, but as an ultimate principle which is not created, but ever exists.

Love for a partner, for a friend or family member, for God or for the suffering world has a new context where ALL is included and embraced and nothing excluded. Again, love without reason or goal or object. Love as the shining forth of the awareness that fully encompasses all phenomena in the form of “good” and “bad,” “wished for” and “not-wished for,” “me” and “not-me.”

So yes, hooray, a celebration of love on this day—and on all days. Love without limit, love amidst all conditions, love beyond birth and death. May it be so.