Heart-Shaped Leaves

Céline Dion - My Heart Will Go On

     When you love someone, all of your senses are involved.  For love that is expressed by music, it involves sight and sound. Flowers involve sight and smell. How many of us look at the flower and forget the green leaf that gave the flower its power and nutrition?
The heart-shaped sunflower leaf makes me think of love.

So does the heart-shaped betel leaf of the betel nut tree. According to a Vietnamese legend, it is part of the Vietnamese custom to have these intensely green leaves, in the shape of a heart, to be a part of the wedding gifts.  They symbolize an eternal union.

Love Opens Doors

“Love opens the doors into everything, as far as I can see, including and perhaps most of all, the door into one’s own secret, and often terrible and frightening, real self.” 
― May Sarton
 When the door to love is locked, you must consider other opportunities. The door to love can be locked by different expectations,  cultural mores, or language. The door to love can be locked by fear to reveal the truth or by it being the wrong time. Rumi said these words:

At night, I open the window and ask
the moon to come and press its
face against mine.
Breathe into me.

Close the language-door and
open the love window.
The moon
won't use the door, only the window.
The poet, May Sarton recognized the need to  unlock our own secrets to experience love. Rumi uses the metaphor of the unlocked window.  Sometimes the door itself is love.

A Tremendous Moment

Night and Day by artist Robert Weigand

“What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science: with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs


If  you are given a moment to preserve in life, what would it be?  If your memory has kept a record of that tremendous moment, very likely, you will  want to experience it  once more. It will feel like a miraculous event, a re - birth in a form that is  welcomed with anticipation and pleasure. 
  Walt Whitman said in "Song of Myself"

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,

You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,

You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,

You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

The Weight Of Life

"One word Frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love."

   Sophocles (496 BC - 406 BC)

 The crazy thing about love is that it leaves you weightless. It gives you a feeling that you can fly through the air supported by nothing except the wind of love. How true that is. One of the world's greatest thinkers, Sophocles, understood it too. Love transports you and takes away your pain.

   One woman took Sophocles literally and physically.  Overweight for many years, 

she found love, left her sugar and lost weight.

    Listen to this TED lecture on romantic love. Helen Fisher and her research team took MRI's of people in love - and people who had just been dumped.  But it you want to see what the weightless ness of love looks like, then I recommend Chagall's   Birthday or Anniversary, as it is also known. The painting is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

  

Their Lips Came Together

"How did it happen that their lips came together? How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill? A kiss, and all was said. "  
                     ~Victor Hugo, Les Miserables

                                                                                          A Rose Unfolds

Victor Hugo wrote that being in love was "having a double light". He believed the world could be transformed by love. The kiss is that silent message between lovers.
     I recently learned that Auguste Rodin and Victor Hugo were friends. It is fitting, therefore,  that one of the most famous statues in the world called "The Kiss" by Rodin shows two lovers who seem oblivious to their surrounding or their nakedness. Their kiss, even more than their embrace, has lasted more than a century.

In 1889, four years after Hugo's death, the French government commissioned Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), the preeminent sculptor of the era, to create a monument to Victor Hugo. Because Rodin had long revered Hugo, this commission took on intense personal significance.

Some of Victor Hugo's poems have been set to music. This "melodie" by Gabriel Faure is called "Mai" [May]

Love is the Voice

E.E. Cummings

The sonnets of e.e. cummings tells us a lot about love. Love may live quietly inside you. It may suffer, but don't all our divinities suffer great trials and uncertain fates?  Nevertheless, do not fear. Love gives us strength and hope to begin that which eventually ends. Whether you find love in the air, the land or the sea, love continues into timelessness (eternity). 

being to timelessness as it’s to time

being to timelessness as it’s to time,
love did no more begin than love will end;
where nothing is to breathe to stroll to swim
love is the air the ocean and the land

(do lovers suffer? all divinities
proudly descending put on deathful flesh:
are lovers glad? only their smallest joy’s
a universe emerging from a wish)

love is the voice under all silences,
the hope which has no opposite in fear;
the strength so strong mere force is feebleness:
the truth more first than sun more last than star

—do lovers love? why then to heaven with hell.
Whatever sages say and fools, all’s well

 ~e.e. cummings

You may not always be able to hear the voice of love, but it is there. Wait to feel it. It is the "voice under all silences."

http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/cummings/issue9/Alfand9.htm

http://eprints.ru.ac.za/4183/1/HUGHES-MA-TR93-55.pdf
http://wetoowerechildren.blogspot.com/2011/09/e-e-cummings-fairy-tales.html

A Mighty Heart

 Daniel Pearl was an American journalist working for the Wall Street Journal when he was kidnapped and murdered  in Pakistan by militants  of Al-Qaeda. Anyone who survives the horrific death of a husband killed by militants needs a mighty heart. It also takes a brave journalist, with a mighty heart  to investigate a dangerous assignment.  Mariane Pearl tells us about her ordeal of trying to find  her husband and then recounting his danger and murder in the book A Mighty Heart.

‘A Mighty Heart’ is a modern love story. Mariane paints a a sweet picture of a devoted, slightly goofy husband and journalist committed to exploring “the challenge presented by peace”. She recalls first meeting Danny (who looked like “an elegant extra-terrestrial”) and how he took the night train from Madrid to Paris just to cook her breakfast.

If there are lessons to learn about love, then it must be that love outlasts death and is the best legacy to leave behind. The memory of love is the anchor that connects love to the soul.
   Daniel Pearl never made it safely home to his wife. But the facts of love remain. He took the night train many times just to be with her. The Daniel Pearl Foundation was formed by Pearl's family and friends. The mission of the Foundation is to promote cross-cultural understanding through journalism, music, and innovative communications.Daniel Pearl World Music Days has been held worldwide since 2002, and has promoted over 1,500 concerts in over 60 countries.

Love Is The Door

"Love and meditation are two sides of the same coin.

Meditation and love are names of the same door seen from two different places. Seen from the outside, the door is called love. Seen from the inside it is called meditation. It is just like a door labeled "Entrance" on one side and "Exit" on the other; the same door serves both purposes. So if you arrive at the door from the outside, the label is love; if you arrive from the inside, the label is meditation.

Meditation is becoming filled with love in your own aloneness, and love is the art of slipping into meditation with the other."  ~ Osho

Door Pull at Princeton University

Let us go then you and I, through this door together.

Or as T.S. Elliot said in his poem  The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit. 

I do not know what awaits each of us on the other side of the door to love ("Oh do not ask..."), but maybe that is the point.  Our meditation together can make sense if it.