The Pleasures of Being

I am a very private person and enjoy the deepest intimacies of being. I am also a very public one and have exposed myself in every possible way. I have tested my vulnerabilities time and time again and am not afraid to share, though I am constrained at times in needing to protect the vulnerabilities of the people around me.

Most people probably don’t quite understand what I am talking about when I talk about vulnerability and that is why I wrote my HeartHealth book. There I define the heart as the vulnerability of being and say that the strongest person is actually the most vulnerable one for they are not afraid of the pain of being hurt.

So they take all kinds of risks, the risks of the heart, and that is certainly what I have done a lot of. And yes that makes us a bit crazy for of course the pain and suffering does come. But so do the strong pleasures and ecstasies of being.

The heart is the vulnerability of being, and though I do not write much about it these years, my heart has remained in its vulnerable state. It was not always so and it took me two or three decades to throw down my complicated conceptual mind so my heart could rise over the horizon inside my consciousness.

Maybe I should just confess and say it out loud. I am addicted to love, not the romantic superficial and just fun type but to the deep love one has for one’s wife and children and sometimes for some others that dare to get close enough. Sometimes that love of love drives me toward the heavens and then even there I have someone to love and be devoted to.

As a parent of six children, my unspeakable vulnerability has to do with their lives, their health and happiness and most of all their very existence on this planet. Any parent’s heart goes supernova with just the thought of anything bad happening to one of their children and that’s why I have such strong feelings about vaccines and pediatric as well as obstetric medicine.

On a day-by-day, month-by-month and year-by-year basis, my real vulnerability is experienced by me in my relationship with my wife Luciana. I have written about her before and because her love and vulnerability matches mine we are good soul mates—though if you read my book The Marriage of Souls you will find out that I believe we have many soul mates. I am certainly married to all my children’s souls.

I have a lot of reasons to be in bliss but nothing sends me up into the clouds as when Lu pours her love out to me. Even when she is not totally open to me she is a loving majestic person to almost everyone else.

Through the years we have had plenty of fuel for conflict resolution with me driving the side always pushing for more love, openness and the deepest intimacies of being. I cannot get away from the dreams of the Garden of Pure Love and the oneness of being that exists there, and she has mostly dreamed of independence and more of an individual approach with a love and passion for her own life.

For the second time in our 15 years together I have taken her out of her own life so it has not been easy (to say the least) for her to be at Sanctuary and she has even thought of leaving me here in the clouds and in paradise alone. When great lovers have differences, it challenges our souls down to their roots and you can imagine how deeply we can feel when we are hurting even at the hint of any separation.

Love can be a great pleasure especially when it has been paid for with trials and tribulations that test the fiber of the love. One can get intoxicated on love and passion and sometimes it’s impossible to stop smiling in the heart.

Being a love junky I am attached to the permanent type of love that comes in like a tide and never goes back out, but even the best and sweetest love ebbs in and out so now you know of my suffering. I think I need to spend more time identifying with the ocean of love that is there no matter what the tide but that is not always easy when we are hurting.

Sometimes we have to drive hard for what we want and what will satisfy our beings. It’s in the wanting, imagining and conceiving that certain things arise and are given birth but then there is the prayer, The Lord is my Sheppard I Shall Not Want, telling us to neutralize our desires and come to the complete resting point of stillness and peace.

My readers of some duration know many sides of me and these past 12 months I have been sounding warnings. Nothing has changed there but I am now feeling more like sounding the song of love these days instead of drums of doom.

Actually things have changed as both financial and natural disasters lap even more strongly on our shores. I am hoping that Bangkok did not have it too bad this weekend though we should all be saying a prayer for the people of Thailand, which is mostly underwater.

I am not sure yet but perhaps after finishing the book on cannabinoid medicine I will go back and edit The Marriage of Souls. Its subtitle is “The Second Coming of Pure Love.” For sure the world and everyone in it would do well with more love.

Writing and publishing materials about love is dangerous in an unloving world where there are actually people who hate love and do as much to hurt love as they can. Writing about beauty is dangerous also for there are the envious.

Ulysses was chained to the mast as our attachment to beauty can break the noblest soul. Living with beauty is dangerous if that beauty is just physical since all physical beauty is temporal. Living with beauty can be difficult also because no human with an ego can be that beautiful all the time.

Nature has a lot to teach us about beauty because she is both beautiful and terrible. I watch the sun come up each day now and stare directly into her. It is centering to solar gaze and awake at the crack of dawn. I was never so aware of how much Nature can help us in terms of our spirituality, meditation and prayer. Maybe there is some hope for me after all.