Love, through love, was brought into the world. Through love God gave to us the loneliness love brings. The soul longs for what completes it. The world plunges the soul into incompleteness. We, so lost, run through life's picture show longing for something wonderful. Longing - for those who follow it - leads us to look wherever life takes us.

Somewhere we hope to find ourselves. But through longing we look to others. Nowhere and in no one can we find themselves. Yet everywhere and in everyone lies the self.

So may you seek with longing for the strange inexplicable that will bring fulfilment. The soul so pours out itself to the world; so does God pour out to man. The path for man lies in pouring yourself out until you are empty. Thus may you be full of emptiness. The pouring calls out all that you have ever taken into yourself. So all experience pours through your being. Pour yourself out to those around you. Burn, weep, be still, and thus becoming all things. Being everything you become everything. The soul breaks, its boundaries dissolve. So dissolves longing, and all that is longed for arises in the self. Emptiness is filled. The filled is empty. Man passes away to become God. God melts and is man. Love lingers like an echo, trembling forever.

To become gentle, that is what I speak to you about. But how? For it is a thing I cannot form. Even the word does not describe it. Is there a way to scatter words around the invisible so the formless be seen? Will the dust of our thoughts be like motes in a sunbeam making it known to us?

When we strive for goals we are not gentle. Nor are we gentle when we give up all striving. Gentleness lies in striving with all the hunger yearning in us, yet at the height of that yearning, realising the human weakness in it, but not killing it because we do not like feeling weak.

Gentleness lies in suffering the torment of power and childlike vulnerability, and through love not hide from ourselves or others. And more than that, in the very midst of it, to live with the valour of the abandoned.

Gentleness is in being willing to go out to others enough to have our love make mighty bonds between us. To do this even though we know bonds bring attachment and pain with their joy and wonder. To commit ourselves to enter into the pain and ecstasy of separateness, yet knowing there is oneness.

And gentleness - if only I could throw a mantle over you, revealing you in the very act of veiling with form; you are, more than all else, to melt, to drop, to go on, to suffer not knowing, not having, not being, and to suffer them gently, with love for the human soul, for the man and woman near you. They too long, seek, feel they have succeeded, yet from gentleness we know they do not know, do not have, have not become, and there arises a great tenderness in us for them and for ourselves. And this is gentleness, which is beyond being, having and knowing.

Copyright ©2003 Tony Crisp