Living With Trauma 20

It is every bit as difficult as it is necessary that I try to describe this kind of love I have been writing about, Gentle Reader. That love without which, if we do not begin to live it and employ it, we are likely going to be doomed as a species. I will give a personal example, something that I have experienced at the Illuminaires and in other public venues. The Illuminaires, as some of you might know, was a kind of community lights festival that used to be celebrated at East Vancouver's Trout Lake Park the last Saturday night of every July. The festival was developed by a surrealist community arts collective, the Creative Dreams Society, and local people would make their own lanterns in community workshops then light them for the festival, which also included music, dancers, stilt walkers, hand drummers and other fun events. It was a truly surreal and magical night that brought the whole community together. One year when I attended I was leaning against a weeping willow while watching the people walk by, many carrying lanterns, candles or torches in the dark. Suddenly it was as though their souls and their lives opened up before me, each one of them. It isn't exactly like I could discern the details of their lives, rather, I had such a heightened sense of each person, of their life, each as an individual, and they became in one sense all sublimely beautiful during that exultant moment, almost as gods and angels, and in another sense, profoundly vulnerable and most openly human. This has often happened for me since, in other places. Sometimes even on the escalator at the Granville Skytrain station, as in other places, or on a busy sidewalk downtown. Often this heightened perception has been fleeting, almost like a flash of light and colour and suddenly everyone is uniform and dull and ordinary again. But I have seen it once, and sometimes I have seen it again. This is the kind of love I am referring to, which I so rarely experience myself, but now I am seeking this again. If we really love others then we are addressing and responding to the divine and the humanly vulnerable in them. This is what needs to be summoned forth in the way we communicate, in our way of interacting if we are to see real healing occur in our lives and in our communities. How do we attain this love? There is a catch. We have to want it badly enough. Not simply to be loved. That's what having a dog is for. But to actually allow that fire of love and its light to enter into our beings. It is like the words of the Sufi poet Rumi: "It isn't easy to be a candle. To give light, you have to burn." When we consent to the divine love it is going to be costly because it is going to take over and transform our lives. But if more of us don't consent to this experience then our species is going to continue its spiral downward, dragging this beautiful Mother Earth with us. How do we sustain this love? By giving it our full attention. I call this prayer, some call it mindfulness, but whatever you want to call it, as that love which we consent to becomes real to us it commands our attention because now we are a host or a vector for the divine. This places on us a huge responsibility because then we have to do what we can to express and channel this love, which means challenging and denying our lower self. But as this love takes action in our lives then our way of seeing others and ourselves is going to change profoundly. We will come to see how much each person is really a mirror for us. Even though others are still going to annoy and irritate us (and we are also going to annoy and irritate others!)we will at least make an effort to recognize their pain, their beauty and their vulnerability. We will begin to cultivate empathy. And in our daily interactions and contacts and encounters with one another we will increasingly take the risks of love.