Love in the time of Covid19, part V

Yesterday, rather late in the afternoon, I found myself pausing for a moment in the front yard, looking out over the creek. I was planning to take a look at some of the neighborhood birds with binoculars; but instead, what drew my attention was a cloud of very tiny midges, insects so small that if you only encountered one of them you wouldn’t even see it.

These gossamer creatures look like tiny bits of spider web or spun silver in the air, so light that the least breeze would sweep them away. At intermittent times of the year, they gather together in clouds to mate. Even then, it takes some effort to see them: like a wisp of smoke, they tremble and disappear unless one focuses.

They express a timeless, ancient quality. They’ve been in this area, to be sure, since the last Ice Age; so small they seem to be almost nothing, and serve no obvious purpose. Their life spans as airborne creatures are, without any doubt, excruciatingly brief.

Yet these dismissable little insects are a product of billions of years of evolution: alive, and vital, and durable, fulfilling a role here that is almost entirely unknown. Like most small creatures on the planet, these tiny things are so complex that a single biologist of determined dedication could spend their lifetime trying to understand the organism in its entirety and would nonetheless only touch the surface of its being, what it does, and why it exists.

Thus even the smallest insect embodies mysteries we supposedly intelligent and insightful humans can't possibly begin to fathom.

Of arguably greater importance is the sheer beauty of these tiny creatures. Care and desire marks their presence; they wish to be, and to be with one another. They wish to reproduce with their own kind. In their own respectable right, they have a wish to be which is equal to our own. It's just different.
And it's possible, watching them hover in the air like the slightest things one could imagine, to see the love present in them.

In the Oxford English Dictionary, like most other academic references to language, love is an action of caring and desire – not a substance. Yet love is a substance; it penetrates everything and is always present. The actions that arise from this substance are the result of its presence. Love, in other words, has a physical nature that goes unappreciated in our assumptions about desire. It’s a rate of vibration within the energy of creation itself.

Of course one could get into long and deep metaphysical discussions about this. But I think the point is that love is substantial; it has a physical nature that can be sensed. In order to do that, however, we have to pay attention to life in its smaller details. We can, oddly enough, see and feel its action quite easily in the beauty that arises in small things: ants, a flower bud. In our rush to be big and important creatures, we too often overlook these things, which are all around us as perpetual reminders of beauty, and being, and the love that gives birth to both these things. Beauty and being are qualities, like love, that can't be explained with algorithms; nor are they created with technologies. They’re born in the heart and soul of the creatures that receive them; and that receiving is equally and in its own right an action of love.

Love, like all other aspects of creation, has varying degrees of intensity and quality. Yet no matter how much or how little it’s concentrated within awareness, its presence, when sensed, always brings a subtle undertones of joy, of beauty, of appreciation, of gratitude to what is in front of us. No matter how sorrowful or remorseful we may become —and these two qualities are also actually products of love, another discussion with deep metaphysical underpinnings—the undercurrent of joy always supports us. Even if we forget it or can’t sense or feel it, it’s there.

It’s something, if we turn to it, that we can trust.

It is possible to trust life and the joy that builds it through an inward intuition of the soul. One does not need to season the day with much of this trust to discover that intuition. One is reminded of Christ's words in Matthew 6:28. The lilies of the field, like the midges of the creek, are clothed in a glory that cannot be added to by our thoughts. That glory, that love and that beauty, are given from the beginning, and lie at the foundation of creation.

We can trust that.

We can carry this light forward in us every day in the simplest way, if we just pay attention and remember its presence within us—as well as its presence within all other things. In a way, it's not any grand gesture of enlightened consciousness that will help relieve the burden of one’s soul in these times; it’s this deeply human and supremely uncomplicated action of being here.

Of witnessing.

Of being here, within love, which is the dwelling place that has been given us.

Be well this day. Relax.

Lee