She Said, “I Am Love.”
Revelation and what to do with it.
It was the afternoon of a marathon writing day. The whole group had been at it for hours, pens scratching, fingers tapping. I was making the rounds when she came over to me, her eyes rapt.
“It’s love,” she said. “And I am love.”
She’d been working with one of my question-holding exercises. The question in this case was what is my life purpose?
You hold the question the way you’d hold a compass. Kind of like a mantra, kind of like something you’re trying to answer for a test. You hold it in the space with you as you write to answer and express it. You feel into what’s coming up: What is the meaning and purpose of life for me? What is it for that person? What has it been? What is it now? You write wherever the writing takes you, and you come back to the question, like a spiral or maze.
We were at a beautiful estate in Umbria eating local vegetarian food made with real care. In the mornings we did breathwork and yoga, and the days were spent doing creative work and holding space for these types of exalted questions. She’d focused intently on the meaning of life all day, and there she was, telling me what she’d found.
What I said vs. what I should have said
What I said was probably “yeah.” Some affirming noise. I was glad for her. Who wouldn’t be glad at such a discovery? Hell yeah! I’m love!
What I should have said I figured out listening to David Deida’s The Man of Zero. He has a line in there: “revelation without practice tends towards delusion.” Meaning: if a revelation lives only in the timeless place where it arrived, it slowly hollows out.
The move, he says, is to step it down and bring the timeless into time, turn it into a practice.
Step it down.
If you have a revelation on the side of a mountain, or four hours into a marathon write, or during a long meditation, that revelation is timeless. It’s true and it is always true. But you don’t necessarily always have a pathway back to it.
One option for finding a pathway back to “I am love”: I am going to treat each person I encounter as if they were also me. That’s a practice. You can do it again the next day, and the day after that.
The revelation is everything. It’s a lit match. But give the flame nothing to burn and it goes out. It’s a brilliant idea you aren’t living by.
Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.
Because the water still needs carrying.
What I’d say now
If she walked up to me today and said “I am love,” I’d say: Good. Now what’s the practice? What would it look like tomorrow morning to live closer to that?
Because the answer might take all sorts of shapes: I’ll write a note to my sister. Or I sit with my mother for an hour without trying to fix her. Or I let the guy in front of me at the grocery store actually take his time.
Practice is what carries revelation across the divide from afternoon to morning, from the retreat back to the kitchen, and from the wide-open voice to the ordinary one.
The exercise
Since this whole thing started with one, here is an exercise. You can do it in twenty minutes or spend all day at it.
Hold a question, something you actually want to go deeper with. What is the purpose of my life. How can I become successful at my creative work? And so forth.
Then what you do is hold it in the space with you. Let it point you in a direction, and never be satisfied with any destination. Keep coming back to the question. Feel into it a different way. What is this for me. What is it for someone else. What has it been. What is it now. The question is fluid; you’re living and breathing with it.
Write without stopping for at least ten minutes.
When you drift, return. You’ll write garbage, you’ll wander into a memory, you’ll start coming up with obstacles and excuses and drifting into fantasy. As soon as you notice, return to the feel of your question, and go deeper.
The returning is an important part of the practice. The question gives you a way of going deeper than if you followed a stream of consciousness.
Then, when you’re done, when you’re blown away by what has surfaced, when have your version of it’s love, sit with it for a minute and ask one more question:
What is the practice?
How can you step down from that into your life? And here, I don’t mean you need to decide what it means or “how will I describe this to people” or “how can I always feel this way.”
What would it look like tomorrow to live so that you’re connected to this, so that the frame of your life and everything that came and went was experienced with this truth at the center, even when the day-to-day doesn’t look magical?
When the answer comes, that one’s the keeper.