I’ve been thinking a lot about love.

Not so much romantic love or family love but big, broad, deep eternal love. Love like Mother Earth has for all life. Love between the sun and the sky.

The Middle Eastern poet Hafiz once wrote: “And still, after all this time, the Sun has never said to the Earth ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with love like that. It lights up the sky.”

Contemporary poet Elizabeth Alexander asks “What if the mightiest word is love?” and US public broadcaster Krista Tippett in her wonderful book “Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living” writes:

“Spiritual geniuses and saints have always called humanity to love, as have social reformers who shifted the lived world on its axis. When the civil rights leaders began to force a reckoning with otherness in the 1960s, they did so in the name of love. The political, economic aspirations of this monumental work of social change in living memory grew from an aspiration to create a ‘beloved community'”.

In my book “the dharma of surfing” there is a little wisdom that goes like this:

“We have within us a capacity to love all of life without judgement or exclusion, like the ocean.  What if we are all from the one source of life, one infinite, eternal energy? Then all life is one.

“The ocean accepts all in her waters: whales, whalers and protectors; predators and prey alike without judgement or exception. So too the sun and the moon and the sky. There is deeply challenging wisdom in Mother Nature.”

Photograph by Scott Johnson

I’ve been wondering whether, in this physical human form, it is possible to hold, to express, to BE such love? And then I remember Mother Teresa, Desmond Tutu, St Francis of Assisi, Jesus Christ, Buddha…

And so I recently wrote a poem called An Experiment with Love

Delicious
Is that a number between
1 and 10?
Or a colour with which to describe
grace or beauty or compassion or wonder?

The soft breath of Autumn roared into
a howling westerly when we
crossed the threshold of June and now
I sit at the window, writing,
with a pink woollen scarf wound up to my ears,
while the forest bends over backwards
under cloud.

Election campaigns are frothing here and
in the US, pitched presidential battles
look anything but promising.
But in the crack that runs through the
middle of everything
I experiment with love.

What if I become one of the ones who
refuse to hate?
Not Trump, not Murdoch, not Rinehart, not Palmer.
What if I allow them space without derision?
This also, is my experiment of spirit,
To explore the broken edges without closing
my heart to the world; 
To remember I am kin to the sea and the sky
and live openly under the sun, dedicated
to the wave and the water and all life.

When I sit on my cushion in the sacred room and breathe,
the inhale fills my belly like food and
the exhale joins the mindstream of eons if
I am present.

The heart can handle anything that arrives at the doorway of our lives.
We could become peace.
Delicious.