My First Love Story

"My First Love Story" is the title of one of Rumi's most quoted poems, that happens to appear in the book "A Year with Rumi" in the corresponding entry for today: 19 May.

The poem goes like this:

My First Love Story

The minute I heard my first love story

I started looking for you,

not knowing how blind I was.

Lovers don't finally meet somewhere.

They are in each other all along.

You probably recognise the last paragraph as it is widely and constantly replicated and shared by us all.

It is the first time I read the poem in its entirety and -somehow- it now makes complete sense to me, as I always struggled to fully understand its meaning.

That last paragraph sounded beautiful and has always resonated with me. I did not need to find its meaning, somehow I felt it, but did not quite understand it and could not -nor need to- explain why.

Now that I have read it in its entirety, it has given me the context I did not have before. That combined with the synchronicity of various conversations I had today, makes it all clear.

The meaning was not clear to me, also because I was still viewing things from a dual perspective, trying to find a meaning within my own experience, but not in non-dual terms but rather from a dual viewpoint.

I now understand that true love is only to be found until after you have transcended duality.

Today, I understood by reading the poem in its entirety, that there is nothing and no one to search nor look for, particularly in terms of love or what we have been told love and being loved was supposed to be.

That false preconception has made us look for love in someone or somewhere outside of our own self and the more we look, the less we see, without realising that we are in effect not seeing clearly, we are -without knowing- blinded from seeing with the heart.

It is not until we turn our attention inward, put our mind and ego on the side, that we can see clearly, once we have released ourselves from self-judgement and let go from our attachments, we can now realise that there is nothing we need to find, because I am everything I need and I am within myself and nowhere else.

That is where true love resides, within myself and nowhere else, as it is, has always been and will always be.

Now you remember?

Finding myself within myself allowed me to simultaneously find myself within thyself. The more I love myself, the more I love thyself.

Finding and loving myself is the cornerstone to lifting the veil and perceiving things from a non-dual perspective, realising that we are all one.

As there is not such a thing as you and I, as we are all one, if you find yourself and the love that resides within yourself, then you automatically connect with the whole, finding yourself and love in everyone.

Yo lo Creo/

I believe, and so it is