Zen Farmer

Some days we forget we are all connected. Some days we remember.

We get so fixated on getting the love we want, that we cannot be consoled by the love we have.  When our heart breaks, that somebody, who we really want to love us, somehow proves that they don’t love us.  Then, all the people who do love us, run to our side and tell us how wonderful we are. Yet we remain consumed by heartbreak, ignoring the love we have and pining for the love we want.  The people that love us the most, don’t even know what to say. They just hurt along with us. Whenever we are at our lowest, thinking that love isn’t working for us, love is working its hardest for us. Love is funny that way.

As you plan to love other people, it is important that you love yourself. If you try to begin a romantic relationship and you don’t love yourself, its like you’re a used car salesman trying to sell a lemon. Of course you are not a lemon, but if you think of yourself as a lemon, you will have problems getting too close. When your romantic interest starts to get close to that part of you that you think is lemony, you will start to freak out.

To love yourself is not as hard as it seems. The hardest part is to stop sending hateful messages to yourself in your thoughts. To stop those hateful messages you can observe those thoughts as they happen and remind yourself to stop. Remind yourself that the thoughts are not true. If they keep coming, you can write them down. If writing them down doesn’t work, you can tell them to a friend and get a second opinion. When you stop criticizing yourself behind your back you will feel better. You will start to like yourself.

The easier way to love yourself is to recognize that you already love yourself. If you are not feeling good about yourself or about things, your deepest wish is for you to feel better. There is no greater love than that.

As you practice loving yourself, you will realize that you have no lemony parts. You will see that all your parts are just wonderful you. When you feel that deep love for yourself, it is much easier to share yourself and your love with others. 

Can you love somebody who doesn’t want to be loved and who won’t love you back?

Love is a force. You can’t really stop it, all you can do is channel it. If you love somebody, you love them. That is all you can do. If you think of a conflicted parent-teen relationship, that is a good example of crazy love that is neither accepted nor returned. A parent loves their child and a child loves their parent no matter how that love is expressed. That love is the basis of life.

Romantic love is different. If you find yourself loving somebody who doesn’t want your love and who doesn’t seem to love you, then, without doubt, you are in a pickle. You can’t exactly not love the person, because you love them. If you can not love them, then don’t. If that is impossible, then you have to figure out the best way to love them.

You should try to make your love huge. Think of love like a fishing net. If your net is small, when you cast it, the fish will panic. If your net is big, the fish will swim around and look for a way out. If your net is huge, the fish may notice the net, but find contentment within it. If your net is open and spacious, the fish may find comfort and security in the net without being confined at all. The net doesn’t mind if the fish is in or out.

As you indulge your love for another person, pay attention to what you expect and what you want in return. If not getting what you want causes you distress, then your love is too small. It is very difficult not to grasp at love. To love big, love like the sun. Shine and shine and love what grows.

With all the different ways to love, it is hard to find the right love. You don’t just want anybody to love, you want a vaguely specific somebody to love. You want somebody who has a bunch of characteristics that makes them safe and fun to love. You may have a very specific somebody in mind, who you already love. All you want then, is for that person to love you back. You may just want somebody to love you. Maybe you want somebody to love for a few hours and then you’ll want somebody else for another few hours. You may just want to love yourself. To find the right love you have to figure out exactly what kind of love will make you whole and then forget about it.

No love will make you whole, because you are whole. In your wholeness you have an idea of having a comfortable, intimate, shared experience with another person. Lacking that other person makes you feel unfulfilled. If that is your experience, you are not seeking love, but an accessory. In seeking a lovely accessory, you may stumble onto the right or wrong love. The right love is characterized by kindness flowing freely both ways. The wrong love is characterized by you being something that you are not in order to sustain the appearance of love. The right love will fit in nicely with your wholeness.

The right love will find you when you accept your own perfection. Your perfection includes your dreams and hopes as well as your insecurities and fear. Your perfection might include all kinds of experiments with the wrong love. Perfection is not a new pair of pants; perfection has lots of patches. The right love is available to you right now, in your beautiful, perfect wholeness.

From our first glance at a television we are taught to seek love. Every princess must find her Prince Charming. True love is what we think of as love.  We believe in soul mates. We believe that there must be that one person for us somewhere out there.   As we come of age, we start finding ourselves having crushes on people, then falling in love with people. We meet new people and wonder, could this be the one? A lot of our youthful energy is consumed, wonderfully, in the pursuit of happiness through love. This is the story of love.  It is a limited story.

Love is certainly at work as we fall in love with each other and begin the mating dance. That kind of love is like spraying water by putting your thumb over the end of a garden hose.  Your thumb blocks the flow of water, so that what comes out, shoots out with gusto.  In order to have this single focus love, infatuation, obsession that falling in love is, we have to block our natural expression of love.  Even the hippies with their free love, still followed the story of love. The hippie free love only slightly opened the flow. All the problems of grasping, jealousy, competition, attraction and rejection still occurred in free love.

The important thing to notice about love is, when true love is present, it is expressed in kindness. Falling in love fills new lovers with fantastic emotional highs and lows. That intensity confuses itself with intense love, as in I love this person A LOT!!!!. Love does not vary in intensity, attachment does. Love is love is love.  If you love a person, you will treat them with kindness.  If somebody loves you, they should do the same. If you are in love and not being treated kindly, you are living the story of love.  True love is inside you, but we sometimes prefer the story, where we connect with love only through another person.

Love is gentle.

Falling is intense.

Love gives you confidence.

Falling makes you nervous.

In love, you trust.

In falling you fear.

Love is eternal.

Falling is fast.

Love is delightful.

Falling in love is delightful too.

As if our egos didn’t cause us enough problems, it turns out, it is the ego that makes love hurt. If it weren’t for our egos, we could love without grasping. If we loved somebody, we could, with confidence, expect them to love us too. Without our egos, we wouldn’t see any reason a person shouldn’t love us. Without our egos, we would likely love everybody.  We would not have to choose who deserves our limited love, because our love would be unlimited.  People’s quirks would not threaten our egos and so we would love quirky people just as much as people like us. That kind of love would be free of pain. What we usually get though, is painful, ego love.

Since we all have egos, we feel like our love is limited and we pick carefully who we will share our love with.  We maintain a tightly guarded inner circle, which we want to invite a certain, specific somebody to join. Once we have chosen somebody to love, the pain begins. It is often pleasurable pain, but deep pain nonetheless. Pain comes in confirming the love.  Unfortunately, when we first fall in love, we are functionally insane, so our powers of objective confirmation are weak. For example, we may confirm our love by waiting for a phone call or a text. We will time how long it takes for a text response. Anything more than a few seconds, we start second guessing the love. That is painful. That is a game of the ego. It has nothing to do with love.

The final blow of the ego is the heartache when love “ends”. During the relationship, the ego begins to define itself in terms of the other person and love. When the relationship is over, the ego sees that it was defined by a false promise and it goes through the painful process of reinventing itself.

These are a few ways that the ego turns love into pain.  Love itself is not painful. Grasping and making demands of love is what hurts.  Most love between people is a meeting of egos. We can expect pain.

Love without ego is comfortable, and eternal in any given moment.

Beware of love.

Love causes pain.

Beware of clouds.

Clouds can cause rain.

Beware of dogs.

Dogs bark and bite.

Beware of the day.

It turns into night.

Beware of birds.

They shit on your head.

Beware of life.

When it’s done, you’re dead.

Be aware of love.

It fills up your soul

Be aware of pain.

It helps you feel whole.

Be aware of the rain.

It flows to the stream

Be aware of night.

In darkness you dream.

Be aware of your death.

It’s waiting for you.

Be aware. Be yourself

And love and love true.

When we fall in love with somebody and that person breaks our heart, we learn to regret love.  We learn to fear love. We learn to guard ourselves against love. Clearly, that is a mistake.

As we distance ourselves from love lost, we will not regret love. When enough time has passed, we will remember the experience of love. We will remember parts of the people we loved with fondness.  The love that we experienced endures.  The pain and regret that we experienced fades.

When you lose love, it hurts. The love you expressed feels wasted. The person you loved seems unworthy. Yet you loved. That love moved you. That love changed you. That love taught you. That love continues to teach you and will always teach you. Well done.

Jesus tells us to love our enemies. Alan Watts tells us to love our enemies as our enemies, because enemies help us to grow. Sometimes we love our enemies naturally, because we love them before they become our enemies. In loving your enemy you achieve one of the highest spiritual ideals. Let’s not split hairs over the order that things occur.

There is no need to regret love. You can regret loss, but love is time well spent.