The Numberless Places of the Heart

 

With love, you can sing, you can paint, you can draw, you can sigh, but you can never capture its essence except in your heart. Therefore, love cannot be taught, it can only be learned. And it is the delight of Love’s teaching to shape you and mould you in ever-increasing degrees into the being that it always intended you to be. Thus it overcomes your resistances, your false turnings, by exerting an influence over your heart, from within. Nothing can be stronger. All efforts to tell us that humanity will change through dramatic – even cataclysmic – events will fail. Love just needs to whisper.

One teacher of this is the rose. Traditionally the rose is ruled by the planet Venus, goddess of love. The rhythmical movements of Venus are said to live in the flower, creating the five-fold spiral of petals, the color and fragrance which are forever summed up in the word: rose. Its essence is indescribable – it can only be felt. If the far-off star can work so secretly in the rose, how much more can the power of Love transform me into the full expression of what I am meant to be? The future is not hemmed in by human or natural disasters – it is limitless. It is as true and certain as the growth of Love in my being which may, ‘ensplendor me and lead me to my throne in the numberless places of the heart’.

 Songbird  (for H)

And if you had a balcony

and I was a songbird

I’d light on some faraway briar

and chant until a snatch of melody

woke you from your sleep at dawn.

And my melody would be clear and true

as your eyes, soft as your breathing,

warm and passionate as your pulse.

So when you were alone in the hours

between dusk and first light or the long

slow morning, you would hear my song

in your head, in your heart,

like the purest dream, and know

that I would never leave you.