A Garden of Life
Writings on Love and Life

How do we fall in love

The beginning
Why do we smile
That first smile
What do we say
After
That first word has been said
Why do we look again
After that first look
Has seen
What the first look saw
Does the origin of love
Lie in the nature
Of second things

Second things

Winter
Does winter only start
After the first snowfall
Has melted away
On a ground to warm
To hold in its embrace
The beautiful white crystals
The watery gifts
From the sky’s cooling breath
Is that then winter true

Summer
Is summer only here
Not when the soil
Begins to warm
But when
The first tiny green shoots
Awakened by the energies
Received
From the straight rays
Of a repositioned sun
Push themselves free
From the soil of the land
To dance in the rhythms
Of the near earth breezes
Is that then summertime

Love begins
When will love begin
When the shock
Of the first felt passion
Abates or declines
To the level of passion
Felt for others
Who are the inciters
Only of passions
Less disturbing
Less distressing
Less demanding
Than passions in full flight
Then perhaps
The opportunity arises
For love to enter the field
The field that has widened
To allow a mind
To sense more than
A body
To now sense
The nature of
Another mind
To observe the behaviours
Derived from
The mental machinations
Of a mind
Formed from
The forces of a physiology
Written by
The mathematics of processes
Driving the chemistry
Trapped in
Or extracted from
The DNA libraries
Within our cells
Those mental machinations
Shaped too
By social structures
The meaning maps
Of our culture

Love attained
When the mind
Has felt the flood
Of the passions
Quieten into
A more gentle ebb and flow
And experienced
Then
In the stillness of a mind
Less forced
Into the urgent shapes
That are derived from
The surface tension
Of another’s body
There may
The mental judgments
Be given time
To consolidate
An understanding of
The whole person
There may love
Find a place
To be itself
To be what love is
More an action
Than a feeling
Love
Thus made real
Not in protestations
Not in professions
But by every behaviour
Whatever it’s intent
Being made rich
With the flow
Of love
Filling the atmosphere
Of the day-to-day
Moments
Of life
Love at its least
Is a feeling
But love in truth
Is a state of being
Found
Not by falling into it
But by
Becoming it

Writings on Love and Life

The Way of Love

Journeying
There are many beginnings
To the end of a journey
There are many paths
To a single destination
When that place
Is not defined
By a position in the world
But is a place in a heart
That beats in time
With the rhythm of being
Then it is the way of travelling
That unfolds the living life
That prepares the spirit
Of the traveller
To be not just in life
But to be life living life
There lies awareness
Expanded beyond
The exigencies of life
Beyond the knowledge
Of the processes of life
And the origins of
The material world
There lies awareness
Awareness sparkling
With the awareness
Of being

Childbirth

There in the awareness
Of the beginning of a world
Seemingly just begun
Is the experience of pleasure
The comfort of the body
The satisfaction of desire
And the knowledge
Of objects of the world
The material and the living
That bring such satisfaction
Or thwarted
Bring such distress
So we seek simple pleasures
From people and obtainable objects
And we learn to like and dislike
We learn of the hierarchy
Of likes and dislikes
We learn of the systems of our life
Our biology
Our minds
Our social roles

Pleasure
What pleasures derive from each
We learn the nature
Of the different pleasures
We discover integrated pleasures
And transition from the passion
Of the pleasure physical
To the satisfaction
Of the pleasure of meaning fulfilled
We move from pleasure to joy
And we move from wanting
That which gives us joy
To wanting to be fully
With that which gives us joy
We move from joy to love
With the highest love being
Being fully
With whom we love

Being in love

I love you with the greatest love
I love being with you
Living life in this wonderful world
With the wonder of you
I strive to find
The way of love
That will allow me
To be in being
In love with you
There we will not be
An I and a thou
We will be an Us

The Journey

To a Lady of the Waters

There in the soft silence
Lies the one who holds my heart
She is like the river
Flowing between the oceans
Seeding them
Feeding them
With the nutrients of life
Reminding all
Who sit on her banks
That life is never still
No matter how quiet
The waters look
They yet travel
To a greater whole
And if you yield
To the water’s flow
You may go there too
Her tears may bring sorrow
To your being
But they are water too
On but a lesser cycle
Yet they show
A greater lesson
That that which the water leaves
Dries up
Loses the rhythm of life
And finds the stillness
Not of the fullness
But of a land made empty
But the tears to the ocean goes
To rain back on the dried land
To return it to life
So nothing is forgotten
Nothing left behind
Those barren places
Are just gardens
Waiting for the rain
So she brought to me
By her nature
Her gift of love
And that barren solitude
Within my life
Now flourishes
With fields of living things
Meadows of green grasses
Orchards soon full
Of a season’s fruits
And nascent jungle
Pregnant with signs
Of approaching
Living beings
So she has brought me
A new world
Wherein we will play
Together
Rejoicing
In laughter and tears
In going forth
And biding time
In togetherness
And separateness
So she holds my heart
In delicate hands
And I her’s
And we feel
Each other’s rhythm
Now in such a short time
Because of these gifts
We already sing
A common song
That is our music
And we flow together
Journeying to
A greater ocean
In a river that is
Us

The Journey

A Small Bit of Love

A big bit of love fills you up
Your spirit soars and gives you flight
Rising up you see a world
Full of your beloved
There is little left beyond
And all that is there
Is tinged with the presence
Of your beloved’s being

A big bit of love fills you up
Inspires you to acts of boldness
Generates plans of great proportion
Colours the future with the sense of success
Marks out plans for great journeys
Holding hands seeing grand sights
Feasting at the delectable table of desire

A small bit of love leaves space for living
Inspires delight in ordinary togetherness
That it colours with a golden glow
Imbuing life with a sense of significance
Made full by the presence of the beloved
Who stands not before you
But by your side holding hands
Looking towards life lived together
With gentleness and warmth
With sparkle and adventure
And with an awareness of life
Enlarged by another life shared
Enriched by feelings and thoughts
Experienced empathically
Acknowledged authentically
Shared openly in deep trust
Allowing each to honour the other
In recognizing the specialness
That lies within the self of the loved
And in recognizing the worthiness
Of the small bit of love
That lies within you
Which though small
Brings a vast awareness
Of the value of you
Your beloved
This amazing world and
The journeys that lie ahead
To be loved and lived together

There is value in love large
And it is in the morning of the day
A wonderful experience
But in time it must pass
For it clouds the living of life
Hiding the blue sky
And reducing the radiance
Of the traversing sun
Masking the world in which
Our journeys need to be travelled

For life to be filled fully
We need love to be small
Not to cover over life
But to nurture its flourishing
Life is not for love
Love is for life
For it is in its truth
A small thing
Which through its smallness
Can permeate everything
Not overpowering it
Enriching it
Making the ordinary special
And the other extraordinary
This day we celebrate
The small bit of love
In one another
Thank you for this gift

The Journey

2 O’clock Eyes

(Peggy in South Africa with flu in early morning, John in a Canadian evening)

For those 2 o’clock eyes
Looking out from a mind alone
Feeling a body only busy
In the living of a personal life
Wondering about a mind elsewhere
That is busy about its own tasks
In its mid-evening time
But now those 2 o’clock eyes
Can know there is one
Thinking of her at this moment
Aware of an intruding virus
Using her cells for its own end
That one was wondering
If he could ever
Send part of him
To be inside her
And use that
Which is so far interior
To make her chemistry produce
Not energies that do harm
But chemicals that multiply
And seed her mind and heart
With messages everlasting
Forever resonating
In her daily consciousness
Establishing a sense of her significance
An awareness of the value
Of her connectedness to others
Of the challenge to fill every moment
With that which
Will make
Every moment full
Allowing today’s time
To flow into time past
Replete with value
And a sense of goodness
So the trails of time in memory
Will leave in the present
A sense of a life lived well
Of moments enjoyed
And of a rich sense
That she has not lived alone
There is this other
That is with her
Living her life
Connected to her
Valuing all
That is within her
Revelling
In her consciousness shared
And walking with her
Into
A future of togetherness

The Journey

Crossing the Ocean


The waters lapping the shore of one country
Will tomorrow lap the shore of another land
The waters rolling in on gentle waves one day
May on the next rage tsunami strong
And here is a shallow bottom with red sea plants
Still able to reap the energy of the waning sunlight
And there is a bottom so far away
It lies innocent of any ray of the sun
Lit only by the bio-luminescence
Of strange and secret creatures
Or by the fleeting golden glow of emergent magma
Shining for a brief moment before solidified and greyed
By the moving tide of waters less hot
Than the molten places within earth blue
Here on and within this third rock
That which is not solid
Seeks out the crack and crevasse
On every surface
Every indentation pebble-wise or horizon spanning
And pours its nature therein
Filling its being
With the living and the still
With the organic and the inorganic
Creating this third realm
Beyond the aerial and the mineral
The liquid the mother of life
Here we stand
As our mother does
Who lies between us
Filled with life as she is
With life calling to the life within the other
Saying come closer
That I may touch those rhythms
The beat of the living within
That I may hear those songs
The music of the living within
That I may see those movements
The dance of the living within
That having you here at hand
We may share
As close as we can
The life living within
The ocean that each of us is
So come as soon as you can
Cross that ocean deep and dear
Come over the mother of us all
And we will sit by the waters somewhere
Everywhere
And let our two oceans
Their surfaces and their depths
Their stillness and their vitality
Their spaces and their communities
Commune as one
Bring all of you
To all of me
Come be with me my love.