When Will Love Come?

A requiem

Yesterday we attended the memorial service for our friend and family member Priscilla Smith.

I refer to her as a family member because—as her son Jacob so rightly pointed out at the memorial—those of us who work together, if we’re sincere about it and stick to it for many many years, become a family.

The work gets into your blood, and from there it sinks into your bones; and once it is in your bones, it penetrates your marrow.

You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave.

After we got home we walked the dogs along the river; and during the walk Neal pointed out that there were two sides of Priscilla’s family there, the Gurdjieff work— a motley crew of spiritual seekers—and the La Mama people— a second and equally motley crew of actors and actresses. Over the years, there’s been abundant cross-pollination between the La Mama troupe and the Gurdjieff work; and amongst the blossoms and the pollinators, it’s always been a contest as to who pollinates whom, and with what. But there is a longtime loving correspondence between these two branches of the family, separate though they may be.

Yesterday Neal pointed out that the La Mama people had always, on the whole, seemed to her to be warmer than the Gang of 142857.

It was an interesting remark; because in my own experience the Gurdjieff work has always seemed to park a significant portion of its ass on a haughty pedestal of its own design. Or carried a broomstick up its ass, to put it another way.

Either analogy suffices in the end, because it effectively illustrates the fact that we have inadvertently—out of a culturally overdeveloped and excessive sense of caution, I think—become utter asses, withdrawn and tentative in the areas of love and warmth towards one another.

The Gurdjieff work has, you see, often secretly (and even sometimes publicly) declared that we don’t talk about love much simply because we don’t know how to love.

Love: verboten.

It occurs to me that if we don’t know how to love, we had better damn well learn, because if you wait to learn to love until you show up at the pearly gates my instinctive feeling about it is that it’s definitely too late. We were sent to this planet to love here and now, not “later,” after we really understand it.

I think the guarantee is, pretty much, that we aren’t going to understand it. It’s the risk we take to discover what it means that helps us grow in spirit and in love. So if we don’t keep the potential for it out here in front of us in every moment, making an effort to at least behave as if we knew how to love, as Betty Brown would have said, “we’re screwed.”

Priscilla, with the help of G family members Pat and Gary, self-published an extraordinarily fine book of her poetry before she died. Among others, she studied poetry with Martha Heyneman, one of our G-family members who also critically informed my own writing. (Martha was one of Betty’s best friends, BTW.)

When I read Priscilla’s poems, at once I instinctively sensed that she had Martha DNA in her. I have a few poetry tricks up my sleeve, it’s true, along with a lot of nonsense, but of us two, Priscilla was the better poet, in the end. As I read her poems, one after another, I found myself wishing I’d written each one of them.

When the ego takes a position like that, you can be sure it knows it has been bested.

In any event the point is that Martha said to me, towards the end of her life, in regards to the sacred energy,

“Why do we keep bleating around the bush calling it ‘the energy’? Why don’t we just call it love? Because that’s what it is, pure and simple.”

The sacred energy is usually referred to as “something” in the work. As though we were too clueless to identify it properly.

But if we do not claim it boldly as love itself, we will never have what tiny portion of it we are allowed to own, no matter temporarily.

When is the time when love will come?

It must be now:
Because there is no other time that it can live in,
Nor another place that it can be—
Except for here 
In the midst of our iniquity.

The place that we do not see within ourselves
Which actually cares—
The place where conscience breathes new life
And dares...

And effects the resurrection of the dead.

Not the life of worlds to come
But the world of be here. 

Now.

In Love.