Small And Simple Grief

Steven Levine, friend of Ram Dass, informed both by Bhakti (Devotional) Yoga and Theravada Buddhism (live as we believe he lived style Buddhism rather than go where we believe he pointed style Buddhism), a practitioner in Western grief work (with Elizabeth Kubler Ross and elsewhere) and married to Ondrea. Steven, true to his Hindu experiences, brings "God" into his Buddhism, or perhaps brings Buddhism into his worship and devotion as do I, though I am Mahayana and also more eclectic than even Hindus care for. They are older, live now in seclusion dealing with their own failing health it is said on Wiki.

"We use the word "love" but we have no more understanding of love than we do of anger or fear or jealousy or even joy, because we have seldom investigated what that state of mind is. What are the feelings we so quickly label as love? For many what is called love is not lovely at all but is a tangle of needs and desires, of momentary ecstasies and bewilderment - moments of unity, of intense feelings of closeness, occur in a mind so fragile that the least squint or sideways glance shatters its oneness into a dozen ghostly paranoias. When we say love we usually mean some emotion, some deep feeling for an object or a person, that momentarily allows us to open to another. But in such emotional love, self-protection is never far away. Still there is "business" to the relationship: clouds of jealousy, possessiveness, guilt, intentional and unintentional manipulation, separateness and the shadow of all previous "loves" darken the light of oneness. But what I mean by love is not an emotion, it is a state of being. True love has no object."
- Stephen and Ondrea Levine

Small And Simple Grief

The small, simple griefs
are as bottomless as those
catastrophic sized,
and worse in their way,
personally placed down in
the deeper caverns
where you can only
hold them, and hold each other
knowing most won't care.

June 13, 2009 11:33 AM