i, i, i i

"For the Sufi, the spiritual life involves gradually letting go of everything we identify with as 'I'...letting go even of the letting go...even as things around you seem to be falling away...the divine life remains to resurrect a different sense of 'I am'.

-- Neil Douglas-Klotz, The Sufi Book of Life

Love does remain. Love with a capital L. Ever, always, wholly, unceasing, within, without, invisible, and always, also, available to be found.

Not for the first time, this book ever so kindly reminds me of something important I was neglecting. And opens to it at just the moment it's needed. Still marinating in that powerful Joan Osborne lyric I quoted last week. And also how intense a response I had to it. It's really how I feel: both the lyric, and my question in response to it. But that question - what if nothing remains? - is also, of course, limiting the view.

Friends who aren't reading Sufi thought but someone like Eckhart Tolle, perhaps, will probably recognize the understanding quoted above. There's 'I' and then there's 'I'. Or rather, there's 'i', right? There's that little, struggling, not-yet-complete 'i' that wants so badly - and so with the best of intentions - to live and love and grow and give and receive. And sometimes that dovetails with 'I', and sometimes it doesn't. And when the doesn't happens, sometimes the burning does.

This is to say nothing about the actions of other people in this process. About which, I will try not to say either. Except that what may not remain for me is trust, or hope, in certain realms of human relation. But this is, for the moment, about the bigger picture and what can, and does, interact there. 'i' am almost nothing, right now. 'i' am perhaps more nothing than i have ever been before. And yet. I had the great privilege of chanting with Sufis the other night. Dear friends have graced my home for dinner, and lively life-affirming conversation. Shimmering ancestral spirits danced around an opening portal in someone else's dream inside my dreamtime. A group of kids called me 'neighbor' on a delivery, and included me in their elated conversation about, of all things, trapping a possum on their front sidewalk. Time, energy, and work are, for blessed once, all available at the same time. For all these things, i will try to remain, for the Love that also is.