Wishing love: a song and poem for the new year

There is a great deal of discrepancy between the world as it really is and the world that we ought to have.

New year is a time for remembering those aspirations both personally and collectively to help us shoot for the stars rather than sinking to our lowest and laziest common denominator of human behaviours! So……today I have a song and a poem around this.

January is ruled over by Janus – the God of doorways, he looks backwards and forwards as he stands at the threshold of new beginnings. This is where we stand right now, it is often a time of quasi hibernation, where we can dream into new adventures and beginnings. A dream is really a potentiality filled with the allure and promise of things not yet formed.

Many of us wish for a world that is brighter, kinder and more fair but somehow we have two left feet and keep creating a world that is unjust, unthinking, not very loving and rather selfish. But this dream of a better world starts with each one of us and how we react, speak and most importantly think. If we can cultivate Wishing Love we take small but powerful steps to creating that brighter, better and kinder world.

Wishing Love and Equanimity are two states of mind that the world could really do with…..Just imagine….!

Wishing Love as a mindset, holds each person to be dear, special and sees their unique combination of wonderful qualities and vulnerabilities. It wishes for that person to be happy, to not experience sorrow, pain or loneliness. It wishes for them to grow, be well and be happy in all things . From this feeling mindset we easily develop compassion and cherishing which informs our actions . We also develop wisdom in dealing with people as we look deeply and contemplate what that person needs in their particular circumstance and with their particular personality traits.

Imagine

When I feel into this, I imagine a world where there is no racism, no rich or poor, no war, no hunger and no loneliness. For that state of mind would not allow these things to be, or would work to ameliorate them. So, whilst we need governments and policies to enact things in a structured way for society; before these actions, first and foremost, we need to develop this mindset as a starting point.

It is not always an easy feeling or mindset to accomplish. I love trying to develop it but being very human I find it is fraught with pitfalls and my lack of wisdom! I practice Wishing Love with my family, friends and people I work with. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it is hard! It is easy with the children I work with because I am in an uncomplicated role of giving anyway – the children respond and I can see their best selves unfurling and growing before my eyes. Sometimes adults have become darkened misanthropes and misjudge me – they can become suspicious, defensive or think that I have an angle or want something.

How do we move from simple acceptance of cherishing love as children to suspicion and rejection as adults? When this happens I can feel hurt but then I realise that it is because I have not yet mastered this seemingly simple state! I hurt because I have mixed it with attachment! When we attach we want something for ourselves, ego and desire enter into this mix and that is what causes the problems. We create a pain body for ourselves that we cloak ourselves with when things disappoint us or don’t happen how we want, and then we move out of love and into more unhappy, selfish states.

To really experience simple wishing love is: to feel cherishing with no expectation, to give love and affection regardless of whether it is returned and a giving with no angles or desires. This is profound and beautiful and would solve so many, many problems. It is a mind that also holds everyone in balance with no favourites and no enemies.

Equanimity

This is a balanced mind, Equanamity, and I think might take me a millennia of human lives to reach. We all have people in our lives that we like, feel a connection to and love in a variety of ways. There are the people whose actions and characters we don’t like or understand or find offensive and then there are people who we have no particular feeling towards and they can assume a sense of banal neutrality. Sometimes people move between these categories depending on the flow of feeling and actions between us. Practising wishing love helps keep people in the group that we hold in a warm and loving way.

Certainly if we had any equanimity the world would be a better place. The current global rise in social inequality is caused by a profound lack of equanimity in how those in power and wealth view those outside their milieu. War and refugee crisis are a direct result of a lack of equanimity. It is a profound break down in seeing the preciousness of each soul.

So, how can we encourage this mindset that does not naturally occur? There will be many ways but here are just two thoughts.

 

Near my house there is a beautiful beach – six miles of it, shaped as a perfect curving bay. It is filled with pale sand and collections of wondrous pebbles – each different, luminescent white, quirky and speckled, shining, deep black, rich red and so on. We, as living beings – I include other species in this – are like this beach. Each being is like a grain of sand or a pebble that makes up a beautiful whole. All are unique and precious. Sometimes when I walk on the beach I look for particularly special pebbles or sea washed glass. But, in reality they are all unique and make altogether, a wonderful beach. The mind of equanimity sees them all as special with no favourites, dislikes or neutrality.

When we think about equanimity in relation to each other we can remember this: everyone is someone’s special person/child, mother/father/ lover/friend. That means we are all special and worthy of this wishing love. The pattern and placement of each other in our lives should not change how we view one another, in an ultimate sense. We are all worthy of wishing love and a mind of equanamity.

In the summer I wrote a concluding song to cycle of songs I have been composing. It is called “Places of My Heart” and it takes us to these two mindsets through song. Here are the lyrics for it. Here is a link to my band and I practicing it in rehearsal https://youtu.be/v7dysLak_Hk

Places of My Heart

Refrain

The places of my heart

Are known by the silhouettes

Of the ones I hold so true,

A heartbeat, a signpost

To each one of you.

V1

My signposts they are many

Flung like flames far and wide

Unfurling fronds of tenderness

That touch each one of you

Held quite simply, in my one heart.

Beating true.

Repeat refrain.

V2

How can one heart be more precious?

Heart flames spread far and wide

Hold each in beating balance

Love’s embracing circle.

I hold it in my one heart,

holding each and everyone.

Dear, eternal, true.

Repeat Refrain.

And, contemplating this as a thing to do in my human life and the difficulty of weaving that into my journey as a songwriter, teacher of music, wife, mother, friend….here is a poem (not yet a song for a melody did not arrive with it- usually they come together). It is my response to where I stand this January on this path, looking backwards, forwards, with a dream, an aspiration and at an eternal place of evolving….

 

Fill Me with Gold

Fill me with gold for my journey

As I stand alone on my two feet

To feel the strength of my purpose

The skeins of song I want you to meet.

 

I am very imperfect

and sometimes I’ll miss a beat.

Yet I’ll channel a magical flow

Despite the dragon of self doubt at my feet.

 

So, fill me with gold for my journey

As I stand alone on my two feet.

To feel the strength

of my purpose

The skeins of song I want you to meet.

 

My heart reaches out in wonder

and loves those I am destined to meet.

Such World Love is an innocent Beauty.

But can be spurned and returned to my feet.

 

So, fill me with gold for my journey

As I stand alone on my two feet.

To feel the strength of my purpose

The skeins of song I want you to meet.

 

I feel the gold of my vision

To sing of love and illumination

The field of potential where we all meet.

A strand of growing and giving

As I stand humbly and lovingly on two feet.

 

First published by the author on her Abi’s World of Music site

Featured image of Janus after water colour by Tony Grist via Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication; Image of Moray Firth from Findhorn Beach by F Leask via Wikimedia Commons CC BY SA 2.0