I spend long hours here in the hammock, listening to the waves of the Caribbean sea. I love sunsets. Because the sun touches my skin warmest. And I then see it surrender itself for love. No matter how powerful, it too kneels for love, for his beloved, just like a knight kneels at the feet of his beloved. Kissed by dusk the sun becomes the kiss itself; it gives itself, dissolves and becomes everything, and we enter a sky of fire, passion and desire. A mysticism, a wild unknown that holds an entirety within itself regardless of what we may or may not see with our eyes.
Then we deepen into an intimacy, a quietness. An invitation to listening. The private emotional lover’s cocoon; when the sun enters the bedchambers of his beloved, the lunar maiden. All lovers need their private sacred love spaces, where it’s a world for just the two of them. Night is darker, veiled. Intimate, sensate, like lover’s silk. We sharpen our senses, tune deeply into our bodies, and we listen; we often feel into things non-linear, spiritual, soul things.
Just like the sun as it kisses the arms of dusk, we reach our hands across the lines that separate us, an opportunity for a deepening into the lands of the union of nuances. In deep love, boundaries dissolve, and two people see the deeper selves, true selves, without the masks and outer layers.
This is where lovers meet – in a place beyond time, beyond skins. We may not always know where exactly their love story began, but we now it’s began, and began again, as if there was no time in between; just like when the sun kisses the arms of dawn, love too is a bridge revealed where dusk and dawn always kiss and merge.
I’ve come to know time exists only due to resistance. It is a matter of resistance. A fabric. Without resistance, there is no time, at least not in the way we may often think of it. As boundaries dissolve a union enters us and we fall into the non-linearity of things.
Love teaches us this. Because love is a surrender. There is no resistance in true love. Time doesn’t exist there within it. This is why in moments when we fall so deeply in the present moment, in the body of it, in a moment where we are with a loved one or lost in something we love doing – time stops. It feels timeless.
And the dancer becomes the dance itself, the poet the poem, and the one kissing and being kissed becomes the kiss itself. Love becomes loving.
When does water actually begin? Is it when the pipe bursts, when we turn on the faucet, or perhaps when we accidently push a rock in the backyard and water springs. It’s unexpected. It’s pure. It’s true.
We may often not know when soul deep love began; but we certainly know it’s begun. We know it because even though we’ve only been looking into each other’s eyes for a little while, it’s as if we’ve known each other more than one life should allow. In a time before time beyond time, love begins; and in timelessness it always lives and moves us.
Because water is water, whether as vapour, snow, ice, rivers or lakes or seas or rainlife, water is water. Love is love, and love reincarnates love always. Such love things are not to be known nor rationalized by minds or logic; it is felt and known by soul, because it’s a soul thing.
And yet when two worlds meet, and touch, we realize love wasn’t just felt by our hearts, it is known by our hands also. It’s a gift of this life – to have hands to hold each other, to have lips with which to say I love you, to have ears to hear the laughter of our loved ones. It’s a gift – an opportunity for us – to embody love, and become the loving itself. To give love its hands, its movements, its lips – so that it isn’t just a beautiful idea in the sky, it has hands, it has a body, it moves.
Love is to know and be known, not of flesh, but through the flesh.
It is said we can’t possibly love someone we haven’t loved in another life. If you love someone it’s because they’ve been good to you many lives before, and this life now is an opportunity to be good to them also. It doesn’t matter whether or not they love you in the way you love them, it’s about the gratitude for them, and being of kindness to them now also.
We are bodies of past lives. Even the brushing against another person’s shoulder, or the fabric of their dress, is in a way, a moment of a thing we often call fate. There is a Korean proverb 옷깃만 스쳐도 인연 meaning that even just the brushing of a collar of a shirt is a connection. A connection not of a mere accident, but rather an interwoven result of past life interactions. A necklace of meetings, of emotions, of experiences, of moments and memories sealed within the fabric of time. An intertwining between the two people to make this momentary interaction happen, even if only for a little bit. Even momentary interactions are the mystical workings of the thing called fate – which is essentially the necklaces of our past lives and what we’ve been making jewel by jewel on our threads.
The word 겁, also known as gup, geop or kalpa, is the word for fate or measurement of time. According to these beliefs in Buddhist teachings, to meet the love of your life, 8000 gups are needed. 8000 jewels, 8000 past life good deeds, 8000 fates.
In Buddhist teachings, gup refers to an incredibly long period of time, often used to describe the vastness of cosmic cycles and the duration of rebirths. It’s a concept that highlights the immense scale of time involved in the cycle of samsara. It is a measurement of time longer than we may even ever comprehend.
Imagine a rock. Imagine now a single drop of rain. Imagine that the single raindrop falls on that rock once every 1000 years. The amount of time it would take for the rock to finally crack from the water droplets is one gup, one fate. So just a single fate is an incredibly long time. Imagine now the 8000 fates.
These sayings go that for every married couple, there’s at least 8000 fates from their past lives that led them to each other.
There are also Chinese concepts of such spiritual natures of meetings and past lives. The saying 前世五百次的回眸，换来今世的一次擦肩而过 means literally “Five hundred glances in the previous life, in exchange for a passing by in this life.”
This means that even mere glimpses with another are the result of past lives; loving glimpses loving feelings and memories and experiences, loving deeds done by you and by the other. Five hundred ones, for a chance to meet.
Another saying is 十世修来同船渡，百世修来共枕眠 meaning “Ten lifetimes of cultivation to cross the same boat, a hundred lifetimes of cultivation to sleep on the same pillow.”
What this beautifully means is that ten lives of your good deeds may meet you with someone to share a boat together, a shared boat ride, even if for a little; and for a hundred more lives, you’ll have a shared pillow by your side.
Whomever you are meant to meet, you will. Because there are karmic and past life influences pulling you towards each other. Karma is a river. Something waters you’ve already poured into it, so it has its flow, you can’t tell the river to go backwards. Other waters you are now choosing to pour; and it is your choice whether you’d like to pour mud, stones or purity.
A mystical hand will pull you towards whomever you are meant to meet. There are two times: one before the meeting and one after the meeting. The one before the meeting is the river, the necessity, and mystical hand; and the one after is your freedom of choice.
Whatever led you to one another and your joined paths is one thing, and whatever happens after is another thing. Before you meet in this earthly life, you had influenced each other without having much conscious knowledge of the other. But after the meeting now you know each other and the mutual influence continues; though now it depends on your self awareness and choices.
And this again is the beginning of something extremely significant – because now you are shaping a new land, a new flow; which is why the 8th house of what happens after intimacy is also a house showing what new karma or dharma you will be creating together, and the fruits of it. What occurs between two people before they become acquainted again in this life can only be regarded as the outcome of these past lives, but what happens afterwards is the expression of our freedom – of a mutually free relationship and behaviour, choices between and within each individual.
To meet anyone you love, you like or even feel momentary inspired by is a blessing. It’s a gift in itself. Your emotions too are the results of past life deeds, your senses and the ability to feel love, compassion and be kind; your generosity is the result of good deeds over many lives, showing your heart has been open and continuous to be, and an open heart is an awakened heart, able to feel true love.
So when you feel love, feel it. Feel it not because of how the other feels, but because you feel it and it may inspire you to be a better person, kinder and more gentle, more generous and more compassionate. And when you meet someone whom you love or feel inspired by, be grateful for this blessing and gift – because it shows that this person has been good to you before, has given you of their love and compassion, and has helped you in some way. Otherwise you will not feel drawn to them now.
You can’t possibly love someone who hasn’t been good to you and loved you in another life. This doesn’t mean they need to love you now as a romantic partner, but I believe it may perhaps inspire you to fall into the wiser and more awakened gratitude of this interactions; and instead of getting imprisoned by ego of what or how they show up for you now, take it as an an opportunity to give to them of your own kindness, generosity and compassion, returning the gift they’ve given you from many lives.
As for love and timelessness,
Love is a process of surrender. A willingness to get into the hammock together, hand in hand, no matter the winds, temperatures and seasons. A vow to keep holding one another, and to keep looking into each other’s eyes; to keep listening, to keep paying attention to one another, and to be flexible enough as you navigate the waves of life and changing winds.
Love is a process of surrender, and love is a cinnamon peeler. We surrender our armours, our walls, our judgments, our stories, our blocks, our shoulds and musts, our preoccupations with ourselves and our own projections. We peel the layers off our bark such as the masks we wear, our pretence, our falseness, our conditioned beliefs, our selfishness, greed, criticisms … we peel it off our bark, so that we release our true fragrance, our true self, our sweetest most natural scent.
It is only then that we may fall into an intimacy – an intimacy with another person, an intimacy with ourselves, an intimacy with the world.
Love has its own flow, and a wind comes and takes us, and it may not be in the direction we thought but we must follow it; it may not have come from the direction we’ve been staring at, but we must give ourselves to it now.
To walk the path of love is to allow to be taken to somewhere you may have never been before, a wild unknown land, somewhere wholly new, where not much will be in your control. But it’s something that will transform you, grow you, expand you.
Love is where there is no time. Time is only something that exists because of resistance. So in love, there is no time. This is why it feels timeless, like time stops, when you are fully present in a moment with a loved one, with your family, with something you love doing.
This takes courage – to let go of time and of resistance. To enter the kingdom of love is only for those truly brave. Because it will ask you on the very portals of the gates to take it all off and surrender yourself to love and compassion. To let go of the selfishness, judgments, falseness, masks, fears, limitations, armours. And to say yes. To say yes to love, yes to life, yes to being humane.
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