The burn of Love's hand... what in the world does that mean? And so I have wondered and pondered for many years now... the brief phrase has become something of a "koan", or mystic-thought, for unraveling...
While cooking the Soup of the Day in our old Kitchen for the homeless, chopping the veggies, and stirring the big pots of slow-boiling soup, I would ponder the phrase that especially challenged me -- after hearing it in my heart, years earlier, while on a solitary retreat high in the mountains of the Sierra Nevadas... You see, I was on my yearly retreat from the Soup Kitchen, with my handful of best-friend-books: poetry and contemplation...
One morning I woke up to a Black Bear looking at me from the "distance" of the length of my arm: I slept with a hammer and small cast iron skillet next to me: ready to clang-a-ruckus for the inevitable bear... My bear ambled off and I rolled over to sleep a bit more... As the sun finally began to shine over the peaks and through the cedar trees, I rose, determined to write some poems...
After a week of searching and effort, I had yet to "find" a single poem... oh to be sure, both Li Po and Rumi were ready with their counsel, but nothing... I was singularly empty: a jangle of disconnected thoughts and words and then, just the silence, birds, rustle of leaves, and my crunching feet on the trails... and a quiet sadness as my retreat was quickly passing... All of the prayer and contemplation Masters write of emptiness just as poets write of those similar hours, days, weeks, months, and even years in which the poet experiences the seeming abandonment of the grace and gift...
And so the fateful day arrived, my last day of my mountain retreat and my last favorite hike along the tumbling Kings River, up the rising mountain, to the look-out point directly across from the mountain named "Sphinx", so named by the intrepid explorer John Muir... I had walked about a half-mile when I suddenly stopped, almost in mid-stride. I had forgotten my pen and pocket tablet which I always carried, ready for the potential arrival of a poem... To return to my camp for tablet and pen would add an obvious mile to my trek: I had not written anything for a week: why should today be any different? I returned to my camp, picked up pen and paper, and returned to the trail...
The disappointing sense of abandonment found in my contemplative sittings mirrored the empty hunger for a poem... One foot and then the other, moving up-trail... It turned out that the empty silence had, after all, been pregnant: a sequence of some thirty poems simply gushed out: I would walk in emptiness, holding no thought in my mind: one complete line after the next would come, fully formed, from mind to pen to paper... and then walking... walking... no thought... and the next, fully formed, line would appear in my head... athlete's call this being in the zone... poets, on the other hand, only bow in humility... words are potentially as sacred as anything else in the Universe... words are the evidence of the heart's hunger and yearning for the One Word that will complete, in self-surrender, the One Life...
I remember, when the phrase the burn of Love's hand simply went Boo! in my head... I stopped, stunned at what the heck does that mean? I pulled pen and paper from my pocket, and wrote it down... I wondered at it, but returned to the trail and re-centered into empty-mind... Now, years have come and gone and still I ponder the burn of Love's hand... sacred moments, here and there, have served as threads of revelation and the slow weaving of understanding... if you are interested in this weaving, you can keep reading...
The burn of Love's hand is this thing that we all call life... In living, and in and through all of our struggles, we are meant to turn the pages of our story into the self-realization that the one, precious, life we have been given is not, is never, about "me"... it is always about a "you", one-by-one, and the Glorious Secret Maybe, that "you" can save someone's life...
I was hungry and you fed me is how Jesus put it, but the essential point is not the food, but the flowing action of simply loving... And didn't he also say, go and do likewise?
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