Why I Don’t Write About Love More

The intellect jumps up with an answer, and I know that answer must be wrong since I know the ego always speaks first and loudest. But here’s the ego’s answer. Because words can’t do it justice. Technically that’s true. Love is so immense, so all encompassing, so forgiving, so inferential, so inclusive, so awesome, and brilliant, that the ego instantly gets put in its place whenever it glimpses just a single photon of Love whizzing by. In this event, the ego experiences humility for an instant and usually reacts with its characteristic grandiosity. It lifts itself up on the head of the Holy Spirit. But deep down, the ego knows it can’t speak on Love, and that it can’t compete with Love.

“The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught.” [CE In.1:6]

In the spirit of full disclosure, when I refer to “the ego” I’m talking about mine. It’s the only one I know from experience so it’s the only one I can speak of with anything like certainty. I’ve trained myself to use the words “the ego” rather than “my ego” to help release me from it’s bond, to identify with it less and less. Intellectualization is my preferred defense mechanism, both from the ego and from Love.

I do admire the poets though. I know how their carefully distilled words do encompass Love. While each poem only points at an aspect of Love, just a single aspect, like justice, or romance, or faith. Somehow, mysteriously, through the power of metaphor, the poem infers that this single aspect of Love encompass the whole of Love itself. By the nature of the holograph, the whole is only whole with all it’s parts, and all it’s parts contain the whole within them.

“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.” —Rumi

A poem captures a Holy Instant where Truth has been revealed as beautiful. And where, for a moment, beauty is recognized as the only Truth. Songs do it as well sometimes, as do dances, stand-up routines, hugs, and glances, speeches, gestures, paintings, and prose, demonstrations and sketches and the like. Each in their own way. Love is visible to the naked eye, if we are willing to see it. So why are we so unwilling to see it? Why do we react with embarrassment sometimes when we’re moved by it, when we tear up? I have been trying to overcome that embarrassment out of necessity because I can’t help but be moved sometimes by testimonies of Love.

We humans are unique in that we are capable of being a part of something, and at the same time, experience ourselves as apart from that same something. And when we look upon that something or think about that something, or talk about that something, or try to define that something, we feel perfectly inadequate. That is probably the real reason why I don’t write about Love. Because, still, I can’t look it directly in the eyes.