“In your light I learn how to love.

In your beauty, how to make poems.

You dance inside my chest,

Where no one sees you.

But Sometimes I do,

And that sight becomes this art.” – Rumi

Reading Rumi, a mystic poet of Islam, during these holidays has been lovely as the mystic love he reflects through his work sparkles the light within me, which reflects countless times within my own sphere and inspires me to observe my own feeling of light form in its every single bounce. Suddenly so many thought arises, as the normal behavior of our human mind, and I just try to understand that feeling in context-specific scenario of my own imagination – and suddenly the love finds itself confined, and strangled by fear, ego, and attachment. Consequently, the flow of emotion as art is disrupted – and gradually the image of Rumi in the reflecting sphere dissolves. I feel bad – in a way, an immense pain – not because Rumi is disappeared, but because it reflects my ego again. And you know? Ego really hurts.

For me love has been beautiful – everything was appearing beautiful. I observed the color of fall season this year as if I had never observed any colorful landscape ever before. I have found the warmth in falling snow, and observed the beauty when snowflakes struggle to defy the gravity by struggling to keep themselves brushed over the branchlets. I had approached couple of time some strangers and had appreciated them: “Maybe very few people have observed and appreciated, the most wonderful things I can see in you is (…)”. Those smiles had made me feel love – an incomparable beauty again! Is not it wonderful?

For me, love is love – I mean there is no classification of love (though I talked about three different Greek expressions of love recently from The Pilgrimage by Coelho). In its pure state, it is just like the blank canvas, which offers unlimited joy of being part in painting journey and infinite wonderful possibilities of destinations. Contextualizing love makes it simply cripple on its journey towards that destination by preventing to realize the unbound potentialities – it is not merely collection of theory, but conceptualization of all feelings that I have in this period of a year. Then again, I am very well aware of relation-specific role that I have to fulfill.  Shall I still categorize love based upon the relation?

She is beautiful, lovely, and nice – indeed, I do not have word that I can completely express my perception and feelings about her. At that point, I just realize how even a glimpse of such sight as mentioned by Rumi creates the art. I try to rearrange the words that I have, try to map my words with my own observation of daily life, experience of my past and anticipation of my future – and still I feel unfulfilled to properly express that picture I have of her, yet the process of being part in that art is itself joyful. That is just awe-inspiring. However, there is another aspect that makes me feel weird again – and more or less, it relates to the anticipation of future. When the present ‘Me and You‘, which exists as ‘We‘, is anticipated to be ‘Me and My (….)‘ of the future, the Oneness falls apart. Consequently, I fall victim of contextualizing the feeling of love, and there I forget the joy of being ‘We‘, a joyful journey of painting, in the anticipation of future by mapping the journey with one of the destination rather than embracing any one of the several destinations by fully enjoying the journey itself. The reason attachment as ‘You‘ is anticipated to change to ‘My (….)‘ by reflecting attachment to her and to the anticipated result. After then, I feel weird again.

When I call that ‘I‘, that is what I am trying to dissolve – an ego (attachment to self) should be disappeared. Moreover, that egoistic ‘I‘ asks, “Is one unable to feel the love without feeling pain?” Again, I tremble for the reason that the attachment I mentioned in previous paragraph reflects the attachment that I have for myself i.e. ego. After all, it reminds me of every next day in my Vipassana meditation course which starts with “Start again” – and I just feel like I am still nowhere near to feel the unconditional nature of love consistently. So, I am a seeker!