Friday night I had love pouring out of me to someone I once knew.  I don’t know how or why it started.  A passing thought turned into a sense of presence that blossomed into a conversation of energy as tangible as the wind on my skin.  I was lying on my purple picnic blanket in the grass by the lake watching seagulls glide along the shore.  Sensations of him descended on me like a fog.  They were nostalgic and warm, tender, euphoric, and sad.  Sad but open.  Images of his face came to mind with ease and an otherworldly vibrancy.  Over the past week, I’ve been pestered by a buoyant, elated love for everything in front of me, especially for loved ones whose hearts tug on me, and on Friday night, the sensation of tugging was particularly intense, and all I could think about was how deeply I loved this one person who I no longer see.

I wasn’t really thinking about it at all.  I wasn’t trying to love.  There was just an overwhelming compulsion to wrap my figurative arms around him and surround him with light.  Resistance was futile.  The only thing that gave me relief was allowing the energy to flow out from my heart to his. I placed the mic of my heart against the speaker of his, and the glow became a supernova that consumed me for hours.

Awake until nearly midnight, I felt him in front of me and gave him the love.

We make so much of words.  We look at words to see what is inside a person’s heart forgetting that we have a direct line to their heart, and, as Gloria Estevan sings, words get in the way.  We give words the power to create love and the power to destroy it.  If words cannot carry the emotional intimacy we sense with someone, the intimacy seems invalid or unreal, and yet if words are forced to carry love all alone, there is really no love there.

Let go of words and listen to the heart.  The heart speaks with energy.  A warm glow, a flush of tenderness, a protective envelope of light, a cleansing river.  This energy does not need to begin where the last sentence left off.  For the heart, every moment is new and fresh, and every person is innocent.

In every person, we can relate not just to the one facet of them revealed in this two dimensional snapshot of life but to their timeless self, their future self, the part of them that encompasses their full being.  In the last episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the omniscient entity known as Q moves Captain Picard through time, allowing him to revisit his past self and glimpse his future self.  As he skips through time, Picard watches as his actions in each time period cause the growth of a rift in space that gets larger in the past.  Q is trying to open Picard’s mind to the unity of all time periods.  He tells Picard, “What you were and what you are to become will always be with you.”

See people for all that they are, and you cannot help but love them. I don’t mean guess or predict.  I mean literally open your awareness to their timeless being, and you will sense their divine nature.  Babaji said, “There is no saint without a past and no sinner without a future.”  One of Tibet’s greatest Buddhist saints, Milarepa, began his life as a murderer.  You can love the saint.  Can you love the murderer?  The saint is a seed within him, and the murderer is the vengeful suffering of a nascent saint.

I used to worry how to express love when words become impotent or barred.  I heard two songs on the radio last fall that stood out for me at the time.  The first was “No More ‘I Love Yous’,” by Annie Lennox.  “Language is leaving me,” she sings.  The second was “More Than Words,” by Extreme, singing: “more than words is all you have to do to make it real, then you wouldn’t have to say that you love me, ’cause I’d already know.”

Later that same night, a friend argued that love is not real, only a concept, a form ultimately empty of true existence.  People turn to thoughts of love simply as an anchor, he claimed.  Were all my thoughts and writings of love simply a way of seeking comfort?  Do I simply want to see my world with love in it?  Is a world devoid of love too terrifying and heart breaking for me to accept?

If love begins to wake up in you, don’t worry about those things.  Love is the most inexplicable ground of being.  It comes unbidden.  It moves of its own accord, and does not care about the particulars of your relationship… or even if you have one. Love is awesome.

And you don’t need words for something that takes on a life of its own and crosses the space between two seemingly separated people.  If the wind is blowing you over, it makes no difference whether you express it in words.  Nevertheless, I realized that all my writing and speaking about love can gradually erode the power of my words to point to what pours out of me unbidden on a random Friday night for someone I never see anymore.  What does it actually mean when I say, “I love you.”  It means:

• You are in my awareness.  You are in the same world with me, never exiled.  In fact, you are me.
• I harbor an ongoing, active wish for your well being.  I wonder how you are doing, and I often ask myself what I can do (or avoid doing) to nurture your spirit.
• I never wish you harm.  If I realize that I’ve harmed you, I want to make it better.  If I can’t make it better, I want to change so that I never do it again.  If I do it again and again, I want to stand apart from you until I am transformed or the situation has passed.
• The past does not matter at all.  The future does not matter at all.  Conditions are irrelevant.
• I feel happy when you are happy and sad when you are sad.
• If I could make things better in your life, I would do it.
• If I could take your pain away and make it my own, I would do it… in a heartbeat.

If you love like this, if you allow the energy of your heart to open and flow even when words are in the way, as you dip below the surface turbulence, completely setting aside every condition that seems to make love impossible, something utterly magical takes place.  Your awareness is cracked open, and content from the collective mind pours in.  It feels as though the roof on your mind has been blown off, and your mind now opens up to the vast night sky.  I know of no other practice more powerful than unconditional love to change the very fabric of who I am and wake me up.  After sending love to the person I may never see again, a calm stupor filled my body, and my mind’s eye opened.  I saw the peak of a snowy mountain surrounded by a bright rainbow circle.  My eyes were still open.  The image was crystal clear and bright, as though I were watching it on a television screen suspended several feet above my head in the dark.  I squinted, and the image became even more clear.  Every time this happens, I blink in disbelief thinking the image will disappear, but it persists.  Inside the circle, a figure in a robe of white light appeared, gleaming like ball lightning and full of love.  I think the image was a figment of the collective imagination in response to what I was doing with my energy, nothing to become attached to, but definitely a sign that I was touching something beyond me: the deep ocean current.

Love transcends the small self.  So, perhaps it is not ‘I’ who loves ‘you.’  I just disappear, and there is love.