I am sitting here on a spring morning, the smell of wet grass still holding somewhere in the memory and listening to what happen to be love songs, this time from Kyrgyzstan. Again another thread that can be pulled out from any other culture or context, perhaps as we were reflecting in the poetry class the other day there are only two great themes in life, love and death. Even though I didn’t think about it before what is important is we didn’t say life and death. I think this comes from recognition that life without love is some kind of death anyway. Yet paradoxically we find ourselves quite far from living in love these days. And I think I want to talk about a few thoughts I have been having on this subject. I am by no means an expert on what I have been thinking about except that I am a human being, for which I claim no credit. Perhaps being an “expert”, with all due respect to the experts, in a sense is dangerous anyway. The parable of the expert who went to the master for wisdom comes to my mind. The master kept pouring tea long after it had filled the cup and began to overflow, metaphor of how a mind full of knowledge can’t arrive at wisdom.

The first point that requires some explanation is the title. I decided to call it that because I seem to notice that most people seem to go around searching for “true” love or wanting “true” love. And usually they like to qualify this with some kind of a turn of phrase, usually, “forever”. And paradoxically go on to act in ways that negates this deeply held wish. Again I am at fault myself, for drawing lines on the sand. It doesn’t require much effort or even much thought to do so, so this means that the first impediment to arrive at that state that we wish for is unwillingness to spend any effort. Just imagine how difficult it must have been to those distant ancestors who painted the caves at Lascuax, France. Maybe they didn’t know what they were doing; maybe it was just their way of applying wallpaper to what were obviously bare and un colorful walls. But I would like to think that they wanted to say something about themselves, something lasting, something set on rock. So this means that there is a qualitative difference between the two styles of drawing lines and I think the quality that is the critical difference is a caring attitude. I wanted to say skill but any skill can be learnt to a reasonable level if that care is present.

The words that count are those that have to come from experience. And even then they are the experience per se, that stands separate, different. Words are the efflorescence of experience. I discovered a few such words today in the form of a chapter heading in a book:

Don’t chose your wife at a dance But on the field among the harvesters.

I wish I could have read these words before and perhaps even understood their deep meaning. It would have saved me not some grief. However on the contrary, without this grief I wouldn’t have perhaps understood them as I understand them now. I would like to spend some time talking about these two sentences. First it’s obvious that whomsoever had written those words down, hailed from the country, the village and was thus familiar with the work of harvesting: the acts of preparing the soil, clearing the weeds, watering the soil and sowing the seed. All of this involve much hard work for no immediate result, the result demands terrible patience and are again dependent on chance to arrive to that point, the harvest might never happen, locusts might eat the crop, floods may wash them away. Besides the work in itself tends to be muddy, even tending to the term unrefined.

I imagine an old man or for that matter an old woman sitting on the porch, hands gnarled and brown from decades of dancing with the soil, speaking those words. I imagine they have known their share of dancing too.

'And when he sees me in all and sees all in me, Then I never leave him and he never leaves me. And he, who in this oneness of love Loves me in whatever he sees, Wherever this man may live, In truth, he lives in me...'
Bhagavad Gita, VI:30,31