I Stand Corrected

I remember saying in one of my discourses, maybe even a few times over the last few years, that unconditional love is not possible. But, I stand corrected. While I’ve kept incredibly busy in my (so-called) sabbatical this year, the truth is that I’ve also had the chance to reflect on my bond with you.

Fifteen years.

I sit with this number and it feels both impossibly long and strangely brief, like a single breath drawn slowly.

You have walked with me through these years, and I don’t think I’ve made it any easier for you. I have forced you to question what you held sacred. I have poked at comfortable beliefs. I have refused to fit into the mold of what a monk should say or be, never quite letting you settle on a singular image of me. And yet, here you are. Still reading. Still showing up. Still offering a love so unconditional that I confess, even after all this time, I don’t fully understand it, let alone feel that I deserve it.

One would think that fifteen years would be enough to grow accustomed to being loved this way. It isn’t. Your letters, emails, messages, and your remembrance of me in your prayers and daily lives, your quiet presence on the other side of these words, they still reach something tender in me. They still leave me a little stunned.

Why do you love me so much? I have turned this question over countless times and found no satisfying answer. Perhaps love doesn’t require one.

I thought long about what I could do to show what your love and devotion mean to me. And so I’ve written a little prayer for you. A prayer I say to the universe for you. I am not a poet, nor am I particularly wise. Nevertheless, in my naivety, I’ve scribbled something:

I pray that nothing in the universe
may extinguish the fire of truth in you,
may She who spun galaxies into existence,
spin your sorrows into wisdom.

May your mind, that wild horse,
find green pastures and still water,
learn when to run and when to rest,
and know the difference between chains and reins.

May your children (if you have them, if you want them)
cause you the perfect amount of trouble,
enough to make you grow,
but not so much that you forget how to laugh.

May your beautiful life remain ever blessed
and your wandering turn into a pilgrimage,
and your dreams find their way,
through the maze of self-doubt.

May your loneliness, when it comes (and it will),
not be a prison but a monastery,
not be an exile but a sanctuary,
where something holy can finally land.

May your body be a temple
where peace makes its home,
where illness finds no foothold,
and where each cell is blessed.

May your heart remain ever full of devotion,
of love and empathy,
may you know happiness not as a visitor,
but as a longtime resident. 

May you know love,
not as something seasonal but the kind that stays
even when staying makes no sense,
maybe the kind some of you have for me.

May you give that love.
May you receive it.
May you stop arguing about whether you deserve it (you do).

May gratitude be the lens
through which you see your days.
And finally, I pray that I do not disappoint you (more),
because your trust matters to me.
It always has.

I wore robes in ochre and black, I wore clothes like the person next door (as you can see on Walk the Dragon or Wildr), I changed, I hid myself, I cloaked myself, I continue to do so, and yet you’ve remained steadfast. If love and loyalty assumed a human form, you’d perhaps be it.

Some of you have placed my pic in your car, some on your phones, yet others on laptops. I’m a picture on some walls and wallpaper on some computers. Some of you have even put me on your altar. I’m a bookmark in some books and on the cover of others. A few of you have made me a screensaver and, above all, many of you have saved me in your hearts. I am in your prayers, in your joys, in your sorrows. How come? Why? I wonder. You baffle me.

As I said at the beginning, fifteen years later, I am still at my wit’s end about your love. And perhaps that is how it should be. Some things are not meant to become familiar. Some things should always move us. Each day, I experience it all over again. I am deeply grateful for all that you think of me, do for me.

Thank you, for reading, for questioning, for staying, for loving.

Merry Christmas, season’s greetings, and happy holidays. See you next month.

Peace.
Swami