By Freya Secrest
Loving and Being Loved have always been a bit of a mystery for me. Love makes the world “go around” and is, in some way, a foundation for most connections in life, but as a foundation it requires flexible and consistent intention and attention. Love is not something to put on the back burner and say “OK, got that down, what’s next?”
I have a quote above my desk from Teilhard de Chardin: “The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of Love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered Fire.” This quote has been an ongoing inspiration in my quest to understand more about love because it reflects something of the power and challenge that loving includes. It is powerful in that, like gravity, it is a formative principle for life on earth. It is challenging in that it demands respectful attention, and like fire, can be both creative or destructive depending on how it is used.
I got lots of instruction, as most of us do, about being loving as I was growing up. I was told kindness, thoughtfulness and caring toward others was being loving. My first life lessons in Love had mostly to do with controlling thoughtless self-interest in order to connect with others. My mother’s frequent comment to me was a quote from the Disney Bambi movie, “Thumper, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” As I grew up, those early lessons of how to be loving were refined and polished as I made friends and interacted with a wider world. Love required me to think of outside myself and step to include others in my life and thinking.
When the first pictures of our planet from space were released in the late 60’s, my sense of love and caring opened to include the planet itself. I was in that wave of social awakening reflected in an interest in the Whole Earth Catalog and back-to-the-land living. I brought my glass and tin cans to the recycling center, joined a food coop and practiced organic gardening as early steps in my awareness of our planet as a blue marble to be treasured.
In college, I worked at my university’s organic garden for a year before heading out to study the social impact of pollution in a study abroad adventure. During that year of gardening work, I began to notice how the ecology of life in a garden came together, upholding and supporting itself in the midst of wild diversity. I felt a spirit of connection and integration that needed to be explained by more than just ecological patterns. My quest to understand that spirit took root in a particular moment while sitting one evening in the garden. I was quiet, just enjoying the calm after a day of work when I noticed the head gardener, Alan Chadwick, walking not far away. He stopped and stood for a time and look over the garden. Something about his stance and gaze in that moment struck me. It felt to be a very personal moment and gave me a glimpse of his connection to the garden. I felt how the beauty, health and vitality in a garden grew out of a gardener’s commitment and hard work, but also love. That was a relationship with the world I wanted too.
The next year in Britain for my study, I heard about the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland with its unusual garden and spiritual focus. I eventually went to visit and found my next steps in learning about love there. Findhorn grew my experience of love as a reality in three areas - relationships, work life and partnership with life in the world.
Firstly, my grasp of love in relationship expanded. In the shared laughter of our community interactions we created bonds that helped smooth the tensions of community life and built bridges of understanding and caring. The flow of laughter moved us into natural connections and opened new shapes for being loving. In spite of our differences of age, temperament and background, love grew when we shared laughter, tears, problems to solve, hard work and joyful moments. Love didn’t only descend through a magical interlude or family history, it could be consciously built and fostered.
At that time, my work life was not a place I considered that love really fit in. But in Findhorn Community life, the principle, “Work is Love in Action” reflected a key standard for all activity. I needed to look again at love and its reality in my life. By trying to make a connection between my activity and a loving intention, I eventually found my way to even “love” washing windows, my least favorite task growing up.
Within the field of the community’s commitment to bring love into action, my own effort to choose to approach my whole life with love grew. Love as work, work as love. That lesson continues to deepen my sense of the scope of love’s activity in the world.
My Findhorn experiences also opened the door to new perspectives on a living universe built through love. The story of Findhorn’s amazing garden was part of what drew me to visit initially. I was looking for that deep connectedness that I had noticed in my college gardening mentor. Findhorn’s demonstration of cooperation with the inner intelligence of nature struck a deep chord in me. By reading Dorothy Maclean’s messages from the Devas and working in the garden I began to develop a relationship with nature as a more conscious partner in my life and the world.
My own connection to that intelligence did not emerge so much in words or messages but through a felt sense of joyful resonance. I remember once standing alongside of a row of lettuce in the garden. A tune and little dance movement came to mind and I moved with it. Stepping down to a next row, this one of carrots, a different tune and movement came to mind. That continued with each different vegetable and area of the garden. Each drew out a different quality in my movement, a different tune in my head to express its uniqueness. The joy I found through my appreciation of the plants themselves created a bridge of resonance between me and the life of the garden. I realized we shared a connection of love. My experience of loving the earth became more personal as I recognized and honored the life around me as unique in its essence and gifts to the world.
What I recognize now is that my knowing of love and connection opens through appreciating the specific beauty and uniqueness in all life. As I look back over my experiences, I notice that I have become more fluent in my loving. I am defining love more as a function of connectedness than a static state of being. Love is there in child’s attentive play, in a kind word offered, in a community grappling with an issue, and in a garden’s joyful health and vitality reflected in its green and growing vegetables. It is there in a flower’s vibrant color and in a scent that wafts by on a breeze. We connect to love through word and shape, sound and color, touch and taste. When I chose to recognize and honor the many forms that love can take, I empower them and am myself empowered in my loving. Life is love in action. Love does make the world go around!