Ep. 19: What is Love?

Listen to this episode on Spotify here, or Apple Podcasts here.

On leaving the LDS Church, love as liberation, the dissolution of time and selfhood.

Key points in this speaking:

• Love acts as a mediator between the inside world and the outside world until that inside-outside distinction collapses.

• Every spiritual truth can be distorted by the ego. Oneness distorted can look like consumption of boundaries. But fusion with the lover is seen as strange and unnecessary when you realize that you and the lover are already one.

• Oneness/ silence as the precondition for speech, the thing that facilitates and consumes all our speakings and has a natural impulse towards the creation of multiplicity.

• Although romantic love can be distorted, it can also serve as a window onto unitive reality, a path into intimacy with all there is.

• My story of leaving Mormonism— love for an other (my husband and later, my daughter) is what liberated me. Although many people who leave the LDS Church focus on how destructive and painful the process is, for me it was quite beautiful. The most shocking and still-resonant realization was that nothing real had been lost.

Reading of excerpts from my book Wakings:

The end goes something like this: 

One morning you’ll wake to a stranger in your bed: rolling to one side and the sun askew on both bodies. Such tenderness in those tangled, sleeping limbs: you could kiss every inch. 

Then, the lover stirs and a face comes into view. A familiar ray glances across his features, as recognition dawns on you: not a stranger at all! 

Yes, your head bobs, a smile lilting up from the bones: all my lovers have been one.

Mind still magnetized by the weight of realization, you prepare a pot of coffee (having fallen through the hollow crevice, into the unstoppable ease). Let him not awaken too soon, you think, padding gently over cold tiled floors. 

All the while, a sun elongates slow as your own expansion: so long we have followed you, the rays seem to murmur. And the steaming coffee replies: so long we’ve awaited your final, fatal misstep.

Too many years you’ve spent tightroping across the bright string of life—suspended over the dark unspeakable, the broad abyss. But the thread is an ephemerality, so easily snapped by a flesh made fat on pleasure, by a mind stretched thin by time. 

And the abyss—

Your lover stirs. You go to kiss his forehead, an act of tenderness he didn’t expect. A smile flits across his face: you may not see him again, you realize. Never have you felt so settled in the fragility of your wanting. 

With this settling, a sudden whoosh like the bursting of a dam:

                                          the chest cracks wide—

       light and dark meeting at either side—

      death and life re-rounding through time

Silence now. 

A great weight has passed without a trace. 

27

The bed has always been empty: tousled sheets and all that bright, tight longing. 

What a way to come home to yourself, wandering out and towards the otherness of love, only to wander back to this little cabin of your own questioning:

You knock

And after a long resounding no 

breathe a sigh of relief to find that no one is home.

28

How empty the walls between us, I say. 

From the other side of time, you release a long-held sigh.