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Joy Harjo wrote: "I understood love to be the very gravity holding each leaf, each cell, this earthly star together."

Do you have the whole piece that this comes from? I'd love to read it.

abby wrote:Joy Harjo wrote: "I understood love to be the very gravity holding each leaf, each cell, this earthly star together."
Do you have the whole piece that this comes from? I'd love to read it.

A google search turns up: love is the strongest force

It's a marvellous line, Abby. I think it's true.

It puts me in mind of ee cummings:

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)

[/quote]A google search turns up: love is the strongest force[/quote]

I did find that but was hoping it was also somewhere in verse, thought it probably wasn't ever.

Diane, I've heard that last line of cummings's for years, loving it, but never read it in context, context of gravity, totally the same. I'd liked it for being my fantasy of love. Now I'm thinking it could be another way of talking about the Buddhist practice of tonglen, of taking another's suffering into your heart, wherein you meditate upon changing it into light and sending it back to the one suffering. When I do it the light's pink

Right now I'm reading a book by Kiran Desai that won the Booker prize, The Inheritance of Loss. She writes, "Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself." Who would want romantic love when you could have gravity love? I remember once saying to someone who was offering me the good one that I wanted romantic love. What?

I could talk about love forever.

A decade ago, I completely believed Dawkins' assertion that, "The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.”

To say that the universe is comprised of love would have seemed fanciful nonsense. I still think the universe has no supernatural design and no purpose, but there have been moments I have wholly believed the stuff of life is actually compassion, rather than indifference.

"Compassion", meaning com, 'with', passion, 'suffering', "suffering with", aligns perfectly with the law of dependent arising, the ultimate law that keeps the stars apart, the law that we are programmed to not-accept and so consequently suffer from. The Buddha said that above all, enlightenment entails seeing into the heart of the truth of dependent arising (or interdependent co-arising or however one might phrase it) (pratītyasamutpāda); yeah, of gravity love.

Abby wrote:Now I'm thinking it could be another way of talking about the Buddhist practice of tonglen, taking another's suffering into your heart, wherein you meditate upon changing it into light and sending it back to the one suffering. When I do it the light's pink:)

Show me the place
I can't move this thing alone...
Show me the place
Where the suffering began

The troubles came
I saved what I could save
A thread of light
A particle a wave...

Show me the place
Where you want your slave to go

taking another's suffering into your heart,

I can't move this thing alone

wherein you meditate upon changing it into light and sending it back to the one suffering. When I do it the light's pink

A thread of light
A particle a wave

I love how Show Me the Place is so seemingly simple a song, and yet has endless possibilities.

So far so good, but I'm with you Abby in that I remain chained to the longing; to yearning for love of the romantic variety. LC of course tries to have his cake and eat it by combining sexual and spiritual love (which isn't incompatible with the tantric path), but then again, as he points out in Different Sides, each 'type' of love has different laws. Or does it? Is it possible to love and let go simultaneously? Or can we be human with moments of divinity and just accept the mess? Is there even a choice? This is a topic on which I have only questions.

She longs to be lost
he longs for the same...
So he binds himself
to the galloping mare
and she binds herself
to the rider there
and there is no space
but there's left and right
and there is no time
but there's day and night

And he leans on her neck
and he whispers low
"Whither thou goest
I will go"
And they turn as one
and they head for the plain
No need for the whip
Ah, no need for the rein

Now the clasp of this union
who fastens it tight?
Who snaps it asunder
the very next night
Some say the rider
Some say the mare
Or that love's like the smoke
beyond all repair