Bestselling author of A Path With Heart, Jack Kornfield invites you into a new awareness: how you can free yourself, whoever you are and whatever your circumstances.
Renowned for his mindfulness practices and meditations, Jack provides the keys for opening gateways to immediate shifts in perspective and clarity of vision, allowing yourself to change course, take action or to simply relax.
Presenting different paths to different kinds of freedom – freedom from fear, freedom to start over again, to love, to be yourself and to be happy – he guides you into an active process that engages your mind, heart and spirit, and brings real joy, over and over again.
Drawing from his own life, he presents a stirring call to be here, in the power of the now, the present, to work through life’s biggest challenges.
Jack Kornfield trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India, and Burma. He has taught meditation internationally since 1974 and is one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West. After graduating from Dartmouth College in Asian Studies in 1967, he joined the Peace Corps and worked on tropical medicine teams in the Mekong River valley. He met and studied as a monk under the Buddhist master Ven. Ajahn Chah, as well as the Ven. Mahasi Sayadaw of Burma.
Returning to the United States, Jack cofounded the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts, together with Sharon Salzberg and Joseph Goldstein, and then the Spirit Rock Center in Woodacre, California. Over the years, Jack has taught in centers and universities worldwide, led International Buddhist Teacher meetings, and worked with many of the great spiritual teachers of our time. He holds a PhD in clinical psychology and is a father, husband, and activist. His books have been translated into twenty languages and sold more than a million copies.
Meditation for Beginners
A Path with Heart
The Wise Heart
The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace
A Lamp in the Darkness: Illuminating the Path Through Difficult Times
After the Ecstasy, the Laundry
Bringing Home the Dharma
Teachings of the Buddha
The Buddha Is Still Teaching: Contemporary Buddhist Wisdom
A Still Forest Pool
Seeking the Heart of Wisdom
Soul Food
Living Dharma
Buddha’s Little Instruction Book
‘Jack is one of the world’s wisest, kindest, and most helpful teachers. Reading his book is like sitting and chatting with him about the most important things in your life. He is so warm, so full of practical suggestions, and so generous with simple but transformative practices. This book is beautiful, inspiring, and profound.’
—Rick Hanson, author of Buddha’s Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom
‘A consommé of goodness, heart, laughter, tears, and breath, nourishing and delicious. Rich in hope and deep wisdom for these revved up, rattling times.’
—Anne Lamott, author of Grace (Eventually)
‘With its incomparable blend of deep wisdom, evocative stories, and powerful meditations, No Time Like the Present is the fruit of a lifetime of spiritual teaching. Jack Kornfield’s message is, we don’t have to wait. Love, peace, freedom … it’s all available right here, in this very heart.’
—Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance and True Refuge
‘“Only in the darkness can you see the stars,’ said Martin Luther King, in days that were almost as dark as our own. Like a brilliant star to guide us in these days of darkness Jack Kornfield’s new book appears just at the right moment. It reminds us that there is No Time Like the Present—no matter how dark—to rescue threatened values—freedom, love, joy—within us and in the world around us. Like Rabbi Hillel, Jack challenges us: ‘If not now, when?”’
—Brother David Steindl-Rast, Benedictine monk, co-founder of Gratefulness.org
‘This book is a treasure of useful insights and practical ways of coping with our egoic and false-self search for satisfactions that lead nowhere, except to needless suffering. His charming and sympathetic suggestions for healing fill this book with encouragement and compassion for ourselves and others.’
—Fr. Thomas Keating, founding member and the spiritual guide of Contemplative Outreach, LTD
To my twin brother, Irv
An adventurer, a lover of life, an unbridled spirit
A bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.
—JOAN WALSH ANGLUND
DEAR FRIENDS, AFTER more than forty years teaching mindfulness and compassion to thousands on the spiritual path, the most important message I can offer is this: You don’t have to wait to be free. You don’t need to postpone being happy.
All too often the beautiful spiritual practices of mindfulness and compassion become entwined with a vision of self-discipline and duty. We see them as taking us through a long road of obstacles that leads eventually to distant benefits. Yes, there is hard work of the heart, and there are demanding cycles in our lives. Yet wherever you are on your journey, there is another wonderful truth called “Living the Fruit” or “Starting with the Result.” The fruits of well-being and the experience of joy, freedom, and love are available now, whatever your circumstance!
When Nelson Mandela walked out of Robben Island prison after twenty-seven years of incarceration, he did so with such dignity, magnanimity, and forgiveness that his spirit transformed South Africa and inspired the world. Like Mandela, you can be free and dignified wherever you find yourself. However difficult your circumstances, however uncertain the times, remember, freedom is not reserved for exceptional people. No one can imprison your spirit.
When your boss calls and you feel fear or anxiety, when someone in your family is in conflict or duress, when you feel overwhelmed by the growing problems of the world, you have choices. You can be bound and constricted, or you can use this difficulty to open and discover how to respond wisely in this unfolding journey. Sometimes life gives us ease, sometimes it is challenging, and sometimes profoundly painful. Sometimes the whole society around you is in upheaval. Whatever your circumstances, you can take a breath, soften your gaze, and remember that courage and freedom are within, waiting for you to awaken, and to offer to others. Even under the direst conditions, freedom of spirit is available. Freedom of spirit is mysterious, magnificent, and simple. We are free and able to love in this life—no matter what.
Deep down we know this is true. We know it whenever we feel a part of something greater—listening to music, making love, walking in the mountains or swimming in the sea, sitting with the mystery of a dying loved one as her spirit leaves her body silently as a falling star, or witnessing the miraculous birth of a child. At times like these, a joyful openness swells through our body, and our heart is surrounded by peace.
Freedom starts where we are. Sara, a single mom with two kids, found out that her eight-year-old daughter, Alicia, had leukemia. Sara was terrified, anxious, grieving the loss of her child’s health, scared that she would lose her. For the first year, Alicia went through long rounds of chemotherapy, hospital stays, and doctors. A fearful sadness filled the house, and anxiety colored Sara’s days. Then, one afternoon when they were out on a walk, Alicia said, “Mama, I don’t know how long I’m going to live, but I want them to be happy days.”
Her words were a splash of cold water on her mother’s face. Sara realized that she had to step out of the fearful melodrama to meet her daughter’s freedom of mind with her own, to return to a trusting spirit. Sara grabbed her daughter and did a little waltz, holding her tight. Her fear dissipated. And in time, Alicia healed. She is now twenty-two and just graduated from college.
But even if she hadn’t healed, what kind of days would you have had her choose? You can’t do much with your life if you’re miserable. You might as well be happy.
When I was eight years old, on an especially bitter, windy winter day, my brothers and I dressed in jackets, scarves, and gloves and went out to play in the snow. I was skinny as a rail and shivering with cold. My twin brother, Irv, stronger, wilder, and more robust, looked at me, contracted and fearful, and laughed. Then he began to remove layers of clothing, first the gloves, his coat, then a sweater, his shirt, undershirt, all the while laughing. He danced and paraded around half-naked in the snow, the icy wind whipping around us. We were all wide-eyed, laughing hysterically.
In that moment, my brother taught me about choosing freedom, manifesting a spirit that to this day I still remember. Whether we’re in a wildly blowing snowstorm or feeling the cold wind of loss, blame, or of our collective insecurity, we want to be free. We want to be released from fear and worry, not confined by judgments. We can. We can learn to trust, love, express ourselves, and be happy.
As we discover trust and freedom in ourselves, we will then find our way to share them with the world. Barbara Wiedner, who founded Grandmothers for Peace, explains, “I began to question the kind of a world I am leaving for my grandchildren. So, I got a sign, ‘A Grandmother for Peace,’ and stood on a street corner. Then I joined others kneeling as a human barrier at a munitions factory. I was taken to prison, strip-searched, and thrown into a cell. Something happened to me. I realized they couldn’t do anything more. I was free!” Now Barbara and her organization, Grandmothers for Peace, works in dozens of countries around the world.
This same freedom is here for you as well. Each chapter of this book is an invitation to experience a particular dimension of freedom—we begin personally, with freedom of spirit, freedom to start over, freedom beyond fear, freedom to be yourself, and then discover freedom to love, freedom to stand up for what matters, freedom to be happy. There are stories, reflections, teachings, and practices that illuminate how we get stuck and how we can free ourselves. This isn’t a book that you read just to make yourself feel better for a little while and then put on your shelf. Finding freedom is an active process that engages your intellect, your heart, and your whole spirit. The means and the goal are one: be yourself, dream, trust, have courage, and act.
You can choose your spirit. Freedom, Love, and Joy are yours, in your very life, your exact circumstance. They are your birthright.
Jack Kornfield
Spirit Rock Meditation Center
Spring 2017
What do you plan to do with this one wild and precious life?
—MARY OLIVER
Sometimes I go about pitying myself, when all the while I am being carried by great winds across the sky.
—OJIBWA SAYING
WE ARE BEING carried on a luminous star, sharing in the dance of life with seven billion beings like us. Vastness is our home. When we recognize the spaciousness that is our universe, around us and within us, the door of freedom opens. Worries and conflicts fall into perspective, emotions are held with ease, and we act amid troubles of the world with peace and dignity.
Whitney was caught in midlife troubles. Her mother was scheduled for hip surgery, and her father was suffering from early-stage Alzheimer’s. She wanted her parents to continue living in their home in Illinois, but their disabilities made independent living challenging. Whitney’s brother in St. Louis was not involved and wanted his sister to “take care of it.” So, Whitney took a month’s leave from work and went to her parents’ home to help. When she arrived, the house was in shambles. Her mom needed time to heal from the surgery, and her father was unable to care for himself. They could not afford round-the-clock care, and it was clear they would have to move.
Whitney took a walk up a hillside she’d known since childhood. She didn’t want to lose the family home; she wanted her parents to stay there until the end—and she didn’t want to lose her parents. She wept as she walked, but when she reached the top of the hill, she sat quietly, calmed herself, and looked across the vast midwestern fields stretching to the horizon. The sky was filled with cumulus clouds bringing shade to the many small houses clustered at the edge of town and beyond.
Facing this unbounded vastness, she suddenly felt less alone. She could sense how everything has its rhythm—arriving and departing, flourishing and struggling, coming into being and fading away. How many people, she wondered, are in the same predicament we are in right now? As she breathed with more ease, her mind opened further. I am not the only person with aging parents. It is part of the human journey. And as the space within her opened, she felt more trust.
We can all see this way. We can gain a broader perspective. With a spacious heart, we can remember the bigger picture. Even when illness strikes, a parent is dying, or any other form of loss is upon us, we can recognize that it’s a part of life’s seasons.
What would it feel like to love the whole kit and caboodle—to make our love bigger than our sorrows? Among the multitudes of humans, many are experiencing loss and change. Many need renewal. And still the world keeps turning, farmers growing food, markets trading, musicians playing. We live in the midst of a great and ever-changing paradox.
Breathe. Relax. Live each day one at a time.
As your spacious heart opens, you can rediscover the vast perspective you’d almost forgotten. The spacious heart reveals the spacious mind. This is the mind that, after you’ve stubbed your toe, hopped around, and howled, finally laughs. The mind that, when you are upset with your partner, goes to sleep, wakes up, and sees that what was such a big deal has fallen into perspective.
Your spacious mind is the natural awareness that knows and accommodates everything. My meditation teacher in the forests of Thailand, Ajahn Chah, called it “the One Who Knows.” He said this is the original nature of mind, the silent witness, spacious consciousness. His instructions were simple: become witness to it all, the person with perspective, the One Who Knows.
Pay attention to the movie showing in your life right now. Notice the plot. It might be an adventure, a tragedy, a romance, a soap opera, or a battle. “All the world’s a stage,” wrote Shake-speare. Sometimes you get caught in the plot. But remember, you are also the audience. Take a breath. Look around. Become witness to it all, the spacious awareness, the One Who Knows.
I sat at the bedside of a woman with pancreatic cancer near the end of her days. She was only thirty-one years old. We looked in each other’s eyes, and the layers just peeled away. Her skinny body, her gender, her poetic accomplishments, her family and friends. I was graced to be a witness to her spirit. “How’s it going?” I asked, with great gentleness. “It looks like this incarnation is going to be over soon. It’s okay. It’s natural to die, you know.” And what peered back through her deep, knowing eyes were vastness, tenderness, and a timeless freedom.
Rest in spacious awareness and feel the presence of love. The One Who Knows becomes the loving witness of all things. You become loving awareness itself. The freedom of loving awareness is available; it just takes practice for you to remember it and to trust that it is always here. When you feel lost, stuck in a tiny part of the big picture, contracted, or caught up, take a breath and visualize yourself stepping back. With a spacious mind, you can witness even these contracted states and hold them in loving awareness.
Relax. With loving awareness, you can notice your feelings, your thoughts, your circumstances. Just now. Even as you read this book, witness the one reading and smile at him or her with loving awareness. Begin each morning with loving awareness. Tune in to the space around you, the space outside, the huge landscape that spreads across the continent. Feel the vastness of the sky and of the space that holds the moon and planets and galaxies.
Let your mind and heart become that space. Breathe into your heart. Observe the clouds floating in the endless sky and become the sky. The clouds are not just outside; they are in you as well. Feel the landscape, the trees, the mountains, and buildings all arising in your own heart. Let yourself open, merge into space with love. Relax and rest in the immensity that surrounds you, the immensity that is you. Notice how vast loving awareness can be.
As the One Who Knows, witness it all, let loving awareness make room for everything: boredom and excitement, fear and trust, pleasure and pain, birth and death.
When you walk into a shaded grove of giant redwoods or into a great cathedral, a sacred stillness descends. As spaciousness opens within you, you can experience a profound silence in your very being. You may feel nervous at first, and at the same time, you’ve longed for this. This is the vast silence that surrounds life. Trust it and rest in the stillness. Feel your heart open and become more fully alive. Everything that arises from this silence is only a cloud in the vast sky, a wave on the ocean. Rest in the depths of silence.
Vastness is the nature of consciousness. If you gaze at it directly, you’ll discover that the mind is transparent, spacious, that it has no boundaries, that your heart is as wide as the world. As you open to this vastness, you can allow the waves of life to arise and pass. In silence, you’ll see the mystery giving birth to life, to thoughts and feelings and sense perceptions. The waves of the world rise and fall, expand and contract, the heart beats, cerebral spinal fluid pulses, there are ever-changing rhythms in the phases of the moon, the changing of seasons, the cycles of a woman’s body, the turning galaxies, and the stock market, too.
Begin to notice that there are pauses between the waves, gaps between breaths and between thoughts. At first these seem fleeting, but gradually you’ll be able to rest in these pauses. As the waves rise and fall, you become silent loving awareness itself. This silence is not withdrawal, indifference, or punishment. It is not the absence of thoughts. It is spacious and refreshing, a tender stillness from which you can learn, listen, and look deeply.
Notice how loving awareness fills time and space. This is the mystery witnessing itself. In loving awareness, the river of thoughts and images flows without judgment. With loving awareness, you experience the stream of feelings without being afraid, falling under their spell, or grasping too tightly. Delight and anxiety, anger, tenderness, and longing, even grief and tears are all welcome. And loving awareness encourages the full measure of joy, inviting well-being to grow.
As you rest in loving awareness, trust grows. You trust the universe to run itself, and you trust your awareness to hold it all. I remember when I first learned to swim in the university pool. I was a shivering, skinny seven-year-old. I flailed and bobbed around. And then, one moment, being held by the instructor as I lay on my back, he removed his hand and I realized I could float. It was magic. I learned to swim. In the same way, you can learn to trust loving awareness. It will always hold you.
As an experiment, try not to be aware. Take thirty seconds right now and stop being aware of any sense impressions, thoughts, feelings, and so forth. Try hard. Even if you close your eyes and plug your ears, it doesn’t work, does it? You can’t stop it. Awareness is always here.
Like the fish that can’t see the water, you cannot see awareness directly. But you can experience it and therefore trust it. Loving awareness is spacious, open, transparent, silent, vast, and responsive like a mirror. You can always return to it. It is timeless, awake, and appreciative. Loving awareness sees without possessing. It allows, honors, connects, and dances with life as it is. It appreciates but does not grasp experiences or things. Author Steven Wright elucidates, “I have the world’s largest collection of seashells. I keep it on all the beaches of the world. Perhaps you’ve seen it.”
Benjamin, age sixty-four, lost more than half his retirement savings in the 2008 economic crisis. He knew that he and his wife were better off than others whose mortgages went underwater and were losing their homes, but he became almost sick with anxiety. He checked the stock market ten times a day. His dreams were filled with images of drowning, being chased by hyenas, losing his way. His family told him to stop obsessing, but he didn’t know how. When he came to his first meditation class, it was nearly impossible for him to sit still. Anxiety generated feelings in his body that were hard to accept, and his mind was racing. Should he pull his remaining money out of the badly lowered stocks? Might he lose more by abandoning a questionable real estate venture?
At the second class he attended, I led a guided meditation on space, inviting vast open awareness to surround body and mind. Students listened to the Tibetan bells in the room and the distant traffic and voices outside, listening as though their minds were as big as the sky and all the sounds were clouds within it. This experience brought Benjamin a sense of relief, and he bought a meditation CD to take home. After that, when anxious thoughts woke him in the night, he had a way to work with them. With vast space as his mantra, the grip of his obsession began to loosen. Now he had some perspective. He knew he could safeguard what remained of his money and invest more conservatively. He also relaxed the need to imagine he could control the future. Freed from obsessive thoughts, he was able to be present with his family again.
Shifts like Benjamin’s are possible for everyone. We all remember times we’ve felt spacious and calm. We listen better, see more clearly, exercise more perspective. With spacious awareness, our inner life becomes clearer, too. Difficult emotions get clarified, their energy freed. Depression reveals its message about hurt, anger, and unmet needs. Fearful stories, when seen clearly, are lovingly open to release. The freedom of a spacious mind and heart is always available. Turn toward it. Open to vastness whenever you can. Become the sky of loving awareness.
Spaciousness, awareness, and love are intertwined. I heard Frank Ostaseski, a friend who cofounded the Zen Hospice in San Francisco, tell the story of a resident there in a great deal of pain, who asked if learning meditation could help. He had terminal stomach cancer. They began to meditate by turning a kind attention toward the physical sensations.
But as he tried to open to these sensations, it was too intense for him and he screamed, “I can’t, it’s too much. It hurts, it hurts, it hurts.” Frank told him okay, let’s try something else and put his own hand gently on the man’s stomach and said how’s that? He said, “Oh, that hurts too much.” “Let’s try this,” Frank went on, and put his hands near the man’s feet. He said, “Ah, that’s a little better.” Then Frank put his hands a foot or two away from the man’s body. And he said, “That’s lovely actually.”
This was no special form of body work, no esoteric practice. Just an opening to more and more space. After a few minutes, from a more relaxed face, the fellow said softly, “Oh, rest in love, rest in love.” After that, whenever he’d get in trouble with his pain, he would push his morphine pump and then just repeat to himself, “Rest in love, rest in love.”
It’s really simple. Whether it’s physical or emotional pain, anything you give space to can be transformed. Whatever the situation, widen the space; remember vastness; allow ease and perspective. Spaciousness is the doorway to freedom. Your spacious heart is your true home.
Think of a time in your life when you felt the most expansive, open, and loving. It may have been walking in the mountains, looking at the night sky filled with stars, or after the birth of a child. Remember how spacious awareness feels in your body. How it feels in the heart. Let the mind quiet. Remember how silent it was, how present you could be.
Now close your eyes. Feel that same vastness here and now. Relax and become the space of loving awareness that can allow sunshine, storm clouds, lightning, praise and blame, gain and loss, expansion and contraction, the world endlessly giving birth to itself, all with your gracious and peaceful heart.
Sit comfortably and at ease. Let your body be at rest and your breath natural. Close your eyes. Take several full breaths and let each breath release gently. Allow yourself to be still.
Now shift your awareness away from the breath. Listen to the play of sounds around you. Notice whether they are loud or soft, far or near. Just listen. Notice how all sounds arise and vanish, leaving no trace. Listen for a while in a relaxed, open way.
As you listen, let yourself sense or imagine that your mind is not limited to your head. Sense that your mind is expanding to be like the sky—open, clear, vast like space. There is no inside or outside. Let the awareness of your mind extend in every direction, like the sky.
Allow the sounds you hear to arise and pass away in the open sky of your mind. Relax in this huge openness and just listen. Let the sounds come and go, far and near, like clouds in the vast sky of your own awareness. The sounds play through the sky, appearing and disappearing without resistance.
Then, as you rest in this open awareness, notice how thoughts and images also arise and vanish. They are like clouds. Let the thoughts and images come and go without struggle or resistance. Pleasant and unpleasant thoughts, pictures, words, and feelings move unrestricted in the space of mind. Problems, possibilities, joys, and sorrows come and go in the vast open sky of mind.
After a time, let this spacious awareness notice the body. Become aware of how the body is not solid. The sensations of breath and body float and change in the same open sky of awareness. In awareness, the body can be felt as floating areas of hardness and softness, pressure and tingling, warm and cool sensations, all appearing in the space of the mind’s awareness. Notice, too, how the breath breathes itself; it moves like a breeze.
Let all experience be like clouds. The breath moves as it will. Sensations float and change. Allow all thoughts and images, feelings and sounds to come and go, floating in the clear open space of awareness.
Finally, pay attention to the awareness itself. Notice how the open space of awareness is naturally clear, transparent, timeless, without conflict, allowing all things to be but not limited by them. Remember the pure open sky of your own true nature. Return to it. Trust it. It is home.
What good is a clear mind if not wedded to a tender heart?
WE ALL WANT to love and be loved. Love is the natural order, the main attraction, the mover of nations, the bees in spring, the tender touch, the first and the last word. It is like gravity, a mysterious force that ties all things together, the heart’s memory of being in the womb and the oneness before the Big Bang. The vastness of the sky is equaled by the vastness of the heart.
Neuroscience shows us that love is a necessity; its absence damages not only individuals, but also whole societies. Our brains require bonding and nurturing. Close emotional connection changes neural patterns, affecting our sense of self and making empathy possible. “In some important ways, people cannot be stable on their own,” writes Thomas Lewis, MD, in A General Theory of Love.
All the work of Dante, the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century master poet of The Divine Comedy, was inspired by a single moment of love, and that love lives on. As Jungian analyst Robert Johnson describes, it began when the young Dante was standing near the Ponte Vecchio, a graceful medieval bridge that crosses the Arno River in Florence. It was just before 1300, and Dante spotted a young woman named Beatrice standing on the bridge. The sight of her ignited in him a vision that contained the whole of eternity. Dante only spoke to her a few times and, shortly after his epiphany, Beatrice died, carried off by the plague. Dante was stricken by the loss, but his work was inspired by Beatrice. She became his muse, his anima, the bridge between his soul and Heaven itself.
Six hundred fifty years later, during World War II, the Americans were chasing the German army up the Italian peninsula, as the Germans, in retreat, were blowing up everything in their wake, including bridges, to stop the Americans’ progress. But no one wanted to blow up the Ponte Vecchio, because Beatrice had stood on it and Dante had written about her. So, the leaders of the German army made radio contact with the Americans and, in plain language, said they would leave the Ponte Vecchio intact if the Americans would promise not to use it. The promise held; the bridge was not blown up, and not one American soldier or piece of equipment went across it. The bridge was spared in a modern, ruthless war, because Beatrice had stood upon it and love had touched Dante.
Remember the days you were in love, how it felt on a spring day of crocuses and plum blossoms or a crisp autumn evening with the smell of burning leaves, how your heart soared as you met your Beatrice or Brent standing on the street corner. And if you never fell in love because of the oppression or pain around you, the Persian poet Rumi suggests, “Today is the day to start.”
Love and spacious awareness are your true nature. They commingle. The sage Nisargadatta frames it this way: “Wisdom says I am nothing. Love says I am everything.” Consciousness knows each experience; love connects it all. For a time, you can get caught in fear and separation. We all do. And then loving awareness remembers. Oh, this, too, is a place to love.
Love is inclusive, generous, and down-to-earth. Father Greg Boyle, author of Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, writes about his work with gangs in LA’s immigrant community. He also tends Dolores Mission Church, and in the 1980s, the church was a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants. Recently arrived men from Mexico and Central America would sleep each night in the church, and women and children in the convent. One morning, someone had angrily spray-painted across the front steps: WETBACK CHURCH, intended as a massive insult. Saddened and upset, Father Greg assured those inside, “I’ll get one of the homies to clean it up later.” It was one of the jobs the ex–gang kids he worked with would do.
But to his surprise, Petra Saldana, a normally quiet member of her church, stood up and addressed the congregation in no uncertain terms, “You will not clean this up! If there are people in our community who are despised and hated and left out because they are mojados (wetbacks) … then we shall proudly call ourselves a wetback church.”
Solidarity. Compassion. Love.
Love is unstoppable. It seeps into our words and our actions in a thousand ways. Sometimes it feels limited, sometimes expansive, but underneath, the mystery of love always pushes through. It has a thousand flavors. There is the kind of love expressed as desire: “I love chocolate ice cream; I’d love to find a new apartment.” There is love as an exchange, businessman’s love: “I’ll love you if you make this deal.” There is romantic love, the love that writes poetry and operas, that creates songs and tales of infatuation, falling in love, obsessive love, and the love like that for Helen of Troy, which launched a thousand ships and a war.
There is brotherly/sisterly love. This love cares for others, as part of the human family. In many cultures, family titles are used for everyone from politicians to Nobel laureates: Grandfather Tutu, Grandmother Angela Merkel. In America, we would say Auntie Hillary and Uncle Barack.
There is parental love for each precious child—unshakable caring, like the stories of mothers who lift cars to free their children and those of fathers who rush into burning buildings.
There is devotional love, and there is divine love, the spiritual ecstatic love that grows as vast as the ocean the moment you jump in.
And there is love for no reason, love in being alive, love married to invincible joy, openhearted and overflowing love, free and natural as a spring breeze.
When you open to any form of love, others feel it. Neuroscience calls this limbic resonance. Your mirror neurons and whole nervous system are constantly attuned to those around you, and love is communicable. We catch it from one another. Love permeates activity and changes all things. Neem Karoli Baba was asked how to get enlightened. “Love people” was his answer. “Love them and feed them.”
Jerry Flaxstead, MD, describes his initial revulsion to a patient named Frank, an angry and obese homeless man who had diabetes, was unbathed, and had gangrenous legs and open sores. When he did not take his meds for his mental disorder, Frank would flail his arms and spew epithets and curses at those around him. Frank was admitted repeatedly to the hospital. For Dr. Flaxstead, Frank was a patient who was hard to love.
One day, Frank was brought to Richmond Hospital with congestive heart failure. The diagnosis was serious, and Dr. Flaxstead tended him as best as he could. Then twenty members of the down-home neighborhood church in whose shelter Frank sometimes slept arrived. They brought flowers and homemade food, chanted and sang hymns to Frank, creating a chorus of care and communion. When Dr. Flaxstead returned to Frank’s room after tending to another patient on the ward, he saw that Frank was smiling, bathed in their love. The doctor realized that he had never really seen Frank at all.
No matter where we are, we can see the world through the eyes of love. Without love, everything is constrained, if not false. With love, we stand in the presence of all of life’s mysteries. We can hold a golden apricot, a worn baseball glove, a photo of a child, or an old chipped cup, and our love can burst forth. Holding a stone, we feel the whole mountain. When we gaze at a pine tree, its presence becomes love of the earth itself. When love is present in us, the world returns our glance, radiant and filled with its blessings.
When Bill Moyers was filming On Our Own Terms, a PBS series on death and dying, he was concerned that his young production-crew members had never been close to death. So, he asked Frank Ostaseski, founder of Zen Hospice, to meet with the crew and describe the stages of dying and the people they would be filming. To humanize it, Frank handed out eight-by-ten black-and-white photos, intimate close-ups taken of patients who had come through the Zen Hospice over the years. The crew sat quietly meditating on the photos, looking at the eyes and tender faces of each individual facing death. After five minutes, Frank asked them to pass the photos to the person on their right, and they couldn’t. They’d each fallen in love with the person whose photo they were holding.
The human heart longs to love and be loved, yet we are all too often afraid. We’ve been hurt, betrayed, abandoned, misunderstood, targeted, left out, and our love story has become a ghost story. The ghosts of loss and pain haunt us, warning us to hedge our bets and put up a shield to protect ourselves from further loss and rejection.
Rejection is one of the most difficult experiences to bear; it touches our most primal pains of abandonment, echoing the mistaken belief that there is something wrong with us, that we are unworthy, unattractive, unlovable. Whatever form our injury takes—family trauma, abuse, or neglect by an overwhelmed family or a loveless institution—we may become afraid to love. We have trouble opening to love, even for ourselves. Yet each of us is a mysterious, unique, amazing being, fully worthy of love.
Like rejection, fear of death or fear of the unknown can also block our love when we are afraid. We cling to a protective shell, a small sense of self that wants to be secure, to control life. We pretend we aren’t vulnerable, but this is an illusion. We are incarnated in a delicate body, intertwined in the community of life. Our senses have evolved to be exquisitely attuned to the ever-changing world of pleasure and pain, sweet and sour, gain and loss. Love and freedom invite us to turn toward the full measure of this world. They offer the gifts of a flexible heart, wide enough to embrace experience, vulnerable yet centered.
“Ultimately it is upon your vulnerability that you depend,” the poet Rilke writes. We are born and cared for by others, and we’ll die in the same way. For the time that we are here, we are dependent on the web of life. We eat from the farmers’ verdant fields, we trust other drivers to stay on their side of the road, we rely on the water department, the utility web, the electrical engineers, and the teachers, hospitals, and firefighters who sustain our lives. Listen to Mother Teresa: “If we have no peace, it’s because we’ve forgotten we belong to each other.” When we honor our vulnerability and our dependence on the community of life, we open to love.
Yes, you’ve been hurt and abandoned. But you found a way to survive your traumatic past and now the prison door is unlocked; you can walk out anytime. How long will you keep your heart closed? How long will you turn your back on love? Whatever blocks your love is, in the end, unreal. Take W. H. Auden’s advice and learn to “love your crooked neighbor with your own crooked heart.” Have courage. Tend to politics, care for the community around you, but remember that, in the end, it is your love that matters most. Love is your gateway to freedom and your last word.
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