gift of form

The specific forms that love take in our lives arise and pass in time, 

for this is the way of form. Time is the great dissolver. 

But love itself is that which never comes and goes.

We never know what form love will choose to take in the future, 

for there is no love in the future. Love is only now.

 But it can take a cleansing of perception to see through the veil,

 behind the scenes where love is always at work…

 giving birth to one of its forms, one of its children,

 while recycling and dissolving another.

If we become too fused with a specific form we believe 

we need love to take—a particular person or way 

of finding purpose and meaning—our heart will inevitably

 break when love obliterates that form for something new, 

which it always will. This shattering is the great gift of form,

evidence not of error and mistake,

 but of wholeness and profound compassion.

This dissolution and reorganization is a special kind of grace

 that the conventional mind struggles to know.

 But the heart knows. The body knows.

Matt Licata

from A Healing Space

with thanks the beauty we love

photo  Peter Bowers

the dance

At the still point of the turning world.

Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards;

At the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement.

And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered.

Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline.

Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance,

And there is only the dance.

T. S. Eliot

...we clasp the hands of those who go before us, and the hands of those who come after us;

we enter the little circle of each other's arms,

and the larger circle of lovers whose hands are joined in a dance,

and the larger circle of all creatures, passing in and out of life, who move also in a dance, to a music so subtle and vast that no ear hears it except in fragments.

Wendell Berry

excerpt: Healing

Photo:  Peter Bowers