Heart Reading … Day 45

All You Need Is Love — Lessons from John Lennon

Love can flood all our senses as if we suddenly understand the sacred mystery of life — where all is right and good in the world and our perspective feels deeply grounded, unflappable — and then it fades away. Love ebbs and flows, not perhaps with as much reliability as the ocean’s tides, but with discipline the sensation of loving and being loved returns.

Today’s heart reading woke me in the wee hours of the morning out of a sound sleep, much like the initial impulse to begin these readings 45 days ago. I don’t know much about John Lennon other than that he was a member of the Beatles, the preeminent rock and roll band of the 1960s, and that he was a pacifist (or more of a political activist?), married Yoko Ono, and was shot for his revolutionary beliefs.

The revolutionary messages that flooded my senses in the wee hours of this morning include:

• Love the earth with every step
• Love every sip of water nourishing every cell of your body
• Love every inhale of spirit which infuses you with life
• Love every word coming out of your mouth as it is directed toward everyone you encounter, every moment of every day

The image that this last message carried to me was of every member of the United States Congress throwing light and love to each and every other member of congress as well as each and every member of the media instead of the shade — and figurative rocks often thrown from their figurative glass houses.

There are tons of little problems (my vote for the most important goes to miscommunication) and a few incredibly massive problems in the world — like war, this Coronavirus pandemic, and climate change. All problems can be solved by love.

When you love yourself enough to love everyone else, you don’t want to harm anyone else, nor see harm befall anyone else — and you feel an inherent call to act in ways which serve the common good, the wellbeing of all.

When you love the earth you inherently see that the health of the soil and the trees is no different than the health of your own skin and bones.

When you love water you inherently understand that the peace and quiet you know to be critical to your own sanity is no different than the peace and quiet all marine life need to exist in harmony with all that is (and you wouldn’t be in favor of dumping 29 million metric tons of trash — or more than 100 tons of your own lifetime’s worth of trash — in the ocean, and you wouldn’t permit the intense bombing and noise pollution wreaking havoc with species we barely understand).

When you love all sentient beings your heart inherently breaks knowing billions of animals are dying — and struggling to live in disturbingly inhumane conditions — in slaughterhouses and literal boxes. The most intelligently adaptive free roaming animals somehow manage to survive the intense effects of our willfully ignorant, ever-expanding carbon footprints with their ever-decreasing habitats (at least in every “first world” developed country) yet then die by vehicles speeding along billions of miles of roads paved with fossils of other animals that roamed free since the beginning of time…

The key lyric that kept repeating more often than the 12 times it is repeated in the Beatles’ song, “All you need is love” made me wonder how many times the word love is sung in this song. Answer, 62 times. That’s a lot of love in a song!

And then the two lines that give us the most direction (and inspire confidence as they are followed by the promise that “it’s easy”) are: Nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time, and There’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be. These lines demonstrate trust in the process of life unfolding naturally. And the “hard” parts of life emerge when we find love to be elusive, slipping away from us.