Pause for Love

Dear Friends,

Last week was Valentine's day, so it's a good time to pause for love. We'll return to climate-related subtle activism next week.

I was pausing on a walk up to my beloved East Rock in Great Barrington yesterday, and saw this mountain range from above -- really rocks and roots about 4 inches tall. It made me reflect that love of all kinds changes how and what we see. It isn't that love makes us blind, but rather that love gives us new eyes with which to perceive what really is there.

So today we'll practice the "hard eyes, soft eyes" exercise, starting off with various aspects of our immediate personal lives as well as the larger world. With hard eyes we push the world away, even as we may notice some of it clearly and interact with it. With soft eyes we involve ourselves with the world, and may notice other aspects of it, even if outwardly we seem to be leaving it alone.

We can also perform this instructive alternation between ways of seeing with regard to a meditation theme. And today we'll use the meditation theme, "God is love" from the first letter of John (1 John 4:8). That is, we'll push the theme away, denounce it, find fault with it (hard eyes) and then see if we can open to it, allow for it, be instructed by it, enhance it (soft eyes).

We will also undertake our very practical, Baal Shem Tov-derived exercise on either side of this meditation, since it is a close cousin of the hard eyes, soft eyes sequence. All different ways to kneel and kiss the ground!

with love,

Michael