Seeing With The Heart

[manictaz]

"Love is blind," we say, but perhaps it is more accurate to say love sees with different eyes. Love sees beyond the surface. Love opens the door for beauty. When we see with the eye, we develop the ability to refine, to judge, to discriminate. When we see with the heart, we expand the view of what it is to be human, see the common dream, see the wisdom of friends and neighbors, see there is no separation between that which is most beautiful and the everyday world. The eye of the heart sees with a wholeness that allows imperfections and idiosyncrasies to coexist with beauty. The eye of the heart knows surface and depth are not opposites. Beauty is a process, a revelation, not a finished state. Beauty reveals itself over time in relationship. The people I love are beautiful to me. I'm not sure if my eyes are blinded by love or it is love that lets me see their beauty. Knowing them over time, my appreciation of who they are and how they appear increases. Their beauty comes from their liveliness and authentic sweetness, their intention to live lives that make some sense (and some nonsense), the spirited coherence of being who they are.


When we are most alive, we are beautiful. When we are in love, we are reminded that we are beautiful. And sometimes when we know we are beautiful, we find ourselves in love. "In love" usually means the romantic sense of being with one other person who in that moment we feel reflects us perfectly. In love, living in the field of love. Sometimes I have felt like I was in love, even when there was no one I was in love with. I couldn't talk about my lover's hands or eyes or voice. I couldn't focus all this love on one other, and it was both confusing and revealing to realize how much we become places for each other to rest in. Alone and "in love" it is easy to feel like you're making it up. Our songs and movies have told us such great sentimental stories about being "in love," we forget that being in love can be a state of truth as well as an illusion.

Longtime friends witnessing a friend "falling in love" often caution the infatuated person that being in love is a dizzy, temporary state. I think of this territory not just as a delicious romantic dance, but as a field to which we can travel from many places. There is a way in which being in love with anything -- a person, a place, a project -- is crossing a border into a country where the ego does not rule, being in a state where essence is honored. We are both inside and outside our everyday selves. It is always interesting to observe what happens when we return to the land of ordinary life. Can we live with more generosity and trust?

I never want to underestimate the capacity that being "in love" has to change our seeing, expand our vision, and remind us of both human beauty and human frailty. The search for the beloved is full of paradoxes. We want to be who we are when we are our best self, and sometimes because we have met that self when we are in love, we believe that self only exists in the presence of the other. So we hold on to the other and lose ourselves, forget that love is partly of this world and partly of some other place.


What is done with love is done in beauty to celebrate the God that loves. More and more I believe the messengers of love, the envoys and the couriers of beauty are everywhere. And I wonder how something so clear can also be mysterious. The Indian poet Ghalib writes, "This earth, burnished by hearing the Name, is so certain of Love that the sky bends unceasingly down, to greet its own light."