Like me less or more, I’ve no qualms sharing that my persona hosts a little devil, an entity suspicious of principles, endless re-branding of what is obvious and free, including pearls of wisdom, and annoyed with much else in the world. This little sprite is my soul’s guard, my bullshit detector, and my Cara (friend.) She mocks hypocrisy, sanctimonious attitudes, power games and manipulation. Every now and then this sprite, like Tove Jansson’s Little My, when enraged, oversteps a mark and creates wanton conflict with my otherwise gentle nature and, at times, too trusting persona.
When a resolve is needed but not forthcoming, I resort to tools of remembrance – head-clearing techniques that calm the mind. Sometimes this works beautifully, but not today, when, of all subjects, I intended to write about ‘love.’
I’ll go ahead anyway, stating that the illuminating intelligence we call love is a core reality inside us. Words are kind of inept, but Rumi got it right.
‘The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.’
Rumi (translated by Moyne/Barks)
Irrespective of the despair and suffering experienced around the world, there are plenty of instances when people realise love moves in cracked hearts, and the sun dawns – things are the way they are because we observe them that way. This is our creation, our prison cell and our freedom. Fear may kick in when reliable walls suddenly dissolve, but equally, a realm of exquisite frequency can transcend the exacting laws of dense physicality, and stun us with the simplicity of an underlying truth. People wary about being laughed at keep silent, others start creeds, and there’s the occasional genius – the teacher, artist, writer or outsider, who convinces with plain yet startling expressions of the intelligence living inside us, the one being, pulsing through life’s revolution with wings of beauty.
What, I ask myself, would ensue in the unlikely event of every conscious being on this planet becoming enlightened to this deeper reality simultaneously?
I am interested to know what you think …
My thoughts go like this. In the temporal physical world, at least, friction yields energy we can use and direct. When it comes to the psyche, maybe we need to look at the yearning for love as a means to expand consciousness rather than a goal that promises the laurels of eternal life. Life is eternal without this nonsense of enlightenment as a goal, because, think about it, anything that has achieved wholeness stops becoming. A perfectly ripe apple that drops to the ground does not magic itself back to its branch, a new dream begins.
While appearances overwhelm and dazzle us with joy, pain, suffering and confusion in ongoing fluctuation, we can, at times, become aware of this soft rippling breath flowing through the visible and the invisible universe, sustaining the beauty and intelligence that life is ultimately animated by. When this love spins its hidden silver thread through us we are inspired. 
Even my little devil is charmed when our angel appears, serene or with a humorous smile – ah, you remembered, hello again, eternal child, welcome to warmth, elation, wonder and respect for all differences. For a while there is no judgement, no right or wrong. We’re moving in a vastly different dimension, of which the visible world is just one expression.
Various traditions propose or speculate on a purpose to life, but ultimately we create our own purpose by committing to a path and changing its meaning on the go, only the intelligence of love seems to be a constant.
‘The separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one’ – Einstein
Course of Mirrors 
I like that you have a little devil – I think we all should have just one teeny one.
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Quite, Diane. We might have more tolerance in the world.
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Maybe that’s why Christianity (and maybe the other biggies too) has the inbuilt cop-out clause that tell us we can never ever reach a state of perfection. As for most things worth having in life, only God is allowed to obtain it. So the yearning persists, the striving for the green grass on the other side, the frustration. Little My would certainly have no truck with an organisation that told her from the outset she was never going to get what she wanted.
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🙂 Some religious organisations can’t deal with paradox.
My little sprite has a knack for the paradox.
There is a divine ideal we aspire to, of course.
It’s a TOWARDS, it’s about becoming – becoming better humans.
H I Khan, a Sufi, said … The ideal is the means, its breaking is the goal …
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Succinct, and honest. The bullshit detector an essential guide for the balance required by paradox! Great post.
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Thanks Philippa. Forgot to mention, the sprite stretches my tolerance with the occasional insults to my pride.
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I love your little devil – she speaks heaps of wisdom (by a strange coincidence, I am currently reading Louise Hay and Robert Holden’s book ‘Life Loves You”).
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The sprite smiles, loves to be loved 🙂 Never read Louise Hay’s books but know people who did and were cheered.
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It’s morning here on the west coast. My first blog read of the day has me smiling. What a magnificent piece of writing. I’m filled up with powerful peaceful energy for an important day. Thank you. ❤
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Waving. Here on the other side is a perfect half moon hiding behind the clouds and dream time only hours away. Wishing you best things for your day in progress.
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Paradox is at the centre of it all …
Love too …
Purpose – I don’t know, maybe there is no purpose ..
A lovely piece of writing thank you Ashen
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Thank you, Susan. As long as I sense the existence of an implicate order beneath the paradoxical, I resign myself to its brighter intellilgence ☼
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Not sure we should trust the poets on a subject so slippery, but a few arguments jump to mind:
“Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.” (from Dover Beach)
“Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.” (To His Coy Mistress)
“And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.
Anyway, she watched him pace the room
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn’t judge her by that. What I mean to say is,
She’s really all right. I still see her once in a while
And she always treats me right. We have a drink
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it’s a year
Before I see her again, but there she is,
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d’ Amour.” (The Dover Bitch)
“So when or you or I are made
A fable, song, or fleeting shade;
All love, all liking, all delight
Lies drown’d with us in endlesse night.
Then while time serves, and we are but decaying;
Come, my Corinna, come, let’s goe a Maying.” (Corinna’s going…)
“[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)” e. e. cummings
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I wish I was as well read, Herr Professor 🙂
Thanks for the great compilation of last stancas.
A real pleasure this morinng to look up all the poets.
I guess Cummings sums it up.
… and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart …
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Glad to share, but like I said, I’m not sure we can trust the poets, but I’m certain we should not trust the professors!
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🙂
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Certainly no trusting the Professors, but if poets cannot skate on slippery slopes who can? ‘The unacknowledged legislators…’ because they do not deign to legislate?
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“Betwixt and between them – which is, in effect, where Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky also stood. Joseph was out to save people when he suggested during his time as Poet Laureate of the United States that poetry should, like the Gideon Bible, be available in hotel rooms and should be distributed like handouts at supermarket checkouts. And Czeslaw writes about loving herring and strawberry jam as well as beauty and truth.” http://bookhaven.stanford.edu/tag/seamus-heaney/
But all we need to do is to open our eyes at the grocery checkout to see poetry alive and kicking all around us. Someone should post on that one: The Unacknowledged Legislators of Revolutions: those who
destroy
lift, raise
remove, steal
take/lift up/away
Tollere: the raising of a law
one goes up, the other goes down
the teeter-totter of history
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I had half a mind to collar Boris Johnson before he re-enters the bear pit of Parliament and while he is nominally in charge of London Underground to suggest that the advertising strip boards along the carriages should feature a poet a month! Don’t know why I didn’t except that no ideas of mine ever work so I halted! Sponsor a poet might grab a few to pay for the space?
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Hey Philippa, have a full mind about this … https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/culture-and-heritage/poems-on-the-underground?cid=poems
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You inspired me to put pen to paper metaphorically and suggest it for us lesser poets! Thanks . How DO you keep track of your files.I am so envious!
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I don’t.
Google helps me finding forgotten stuff.
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Hi,
Your little devil is what I call the imp in me. That precious, invisible, being that sits on my shoulder, whispering, daring me to be as I am. Love is no illusion; when it shines, it shines through cracked pots and not perfect vessels.
Shalom,
Patricia
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Cheers to your imp, Pat – under whatever name they sneak onto our shoulders, they have a trained eye for cracked hearts & pots, and their natural intelligence deserves respect.
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