Saying For Today: Love is the ultimate simplicity.
* * *
"I don't feel loved," she said tearfully. "I want so much to feel loved!" "It's good to feel loved," replied the Sage. "We all need to feel loved. I need to feel loved. But we can miss it while waiting to feel it. Simply love. The feeling will come. Simply love. The feeling will go. And you'll come to a point when either is okay."
*Brian K. Wilcox. "Meetings with an Anonymous Sage."
* * *
One evening, after a Dharma talk at the Cambridge Zen Center, a student asked Seung Sahn Soen-sa (1927-2004, Korean Zen teacher), "What is love?"
Soen-sa said, "I ask you: what is love?"
The student was silent.
Soen-sa said, "This is love."
The student was still silent.
Soen-sa said, "You ask me: I ask you. This is love."
*Seung Sahn. Dropping Ashes on the Buddha: The Teachings of Zen Master Seung Sahn.
* * *
The mind complicates even love. Love is the ultimate simplicity. Love can be as simple as you asking me and my asking you... that simple.
Could it be complicating love is a means to avoid love? Are we afraid of being loved, though we say we want it? Is complicating love from an unconscious message we picked up from others about us - others who complicate this beauty of simplicity?
Is love evasive? Hiding from some of us and appearing to others - the lucky ones, chosen ones? No. We may look for this love, even long for it, but when we are aware of how so obviously it manifests in the ordinary encounters of daily life, we begin to see love everywhere.
We may not feel love everywhere, but we see it everywhere. We see it, for we have been transformed into persons who can see it, beings who cannot fail to see it. We are not even looking for it now. We do not have to be conscious of love to experience it.
We cannot get away from love; it will follow us even into the privacy of solitude - thankfully. We live together in a love ocean; we breathe love; it nourishes us.
*Use of photography is allowed accompanied by credit given to Brian K. Wilcox and title and place of photograph.
*Brian's book, An Ache for Union: Poems on Oneness with God through Love, can be ordered through major online booksellers or the publisher AuthorHouse.
