Service and Remembrance.

The whole remembers itself whenever love becomes service.

Work is love made visible.

(Kahlil Gibran)

This weekend, having returned from our pilgrimage to Chartres, María and I gather with friends and family in Satsang.

We arrive embodying all that we have lived. There are things for us to do, and beneath everything, there will be something that asks nothing of us: the simple ecstasy of being.

Of arriving without needing to become anyone else. Of recognising that love is not an achievement. It is our nature when nothing is hiding it.

Back in March, during meditation, a name was whispered: The Light of Love.

I did not yet know what it was naming.

Perhaps a name can arrive before the mind is ready to receive its meaning.

Perhaps revelation does not always tell us where to go.

Sometimes, it reveals that we have never been separate from what we seek.

The name revealed a pattern. Now, the pattern asks to become a practice.

The Lattice is not only something to behold. It is something to embody.

Every crossing is a meeting. Every line is a relationship. Every opening is a remembrance: nothing exists alone.

Once we see the whole, how shall we live?

Perhaps the answer is service.

Not service as obligation.

Service born from recognition.

The hand reaches because it remembers that the other hand is not separate.

The heart opens because it recognises itself in another form.

Service is remembrance in motion.

We may seek for years through books, rituals, teachers, lovers. Through distant lands, mountains, temples, silence, and song.

Seeking is sacred. It carries us as far as seeking can.

And then, one day, the seeker becomes still.

Not because the search has failed. Because it has fulfilled its purpose.

We discover that the light was never waiting at the end of the path. It was the light by which we travelled.

There is nothing to find that has not already been waiting within the one who longs to find it.

And who is that one?

Who are we?

We are not only this name, this body, this history, this momentary shape within the world.

We are life looking through a particular pair of eyes.

We are one breath wearing countless forms.

We are the whole consenting, for a while, to answer to a name.

Perhaps we are God playing at being human so completely that we forget we began the game.

And perhaps remembrance is the moment the human recognises the divine without abandoning the play.

To remember our true nature is not to become less human.

It is to inhabit our humanity more completely.

To feel.

To grieve.

To laugh.

To tremble.

To love.

To remain present when the outcome is unknown.

When I see beauty in you, something within me remembers beauty.

When your courage moves me, my own courage begins to stir.

When I resist you, there may be a wound, a fear, a boundary, or a truth asking for attention.

What you awaken in me is mine to meet.

What I awaken in you is yours to meet.

The mirror is not an accusation. It is an invitation.

What I see in you may not tell me everything about you. Yet it reveals something about the place from which I am seeing.

And when I do not like what I see, I need not deny it.

I can ask:

What is this asking me to heal?

What is this asking me to protect?

What is this asking me to release?

What is mine to change?

What is mine to leave?

To recognise that we are one does not mean that everything must be allowed.

Love may remain. Love may depart. Either may be an act of service when it arises from clarity rather than fear. For love does not erase discernment. It makes discernment sacred.

When I remember that you are not other, I cannot serve you from above. I must stand beside you.

I do not make myself smaller for your sake. I bring my whole self to meet your whole self.

Not one whole and the other broken. Not one fortunate and the other unfortunate.

Two expressions of the same mystery, meeting for a while.

This is remembrance.

Not merely looking backward. Not clinging to what has passed.

Remembrance is allowing what love has given us to continue moving through our lives.

Those no longer in form continue wherever their love is made visible.

In the gesture they taught us. In the courage they awakened. In the kindness we now offer because kindness was once offered to us.

We remember them by becoming what their love made possible.

Service and remembrance are one movement.

We remember what we are and serve it in every form.

We remember those who came before and allow their love to continue through our hands.

Perhaps this is collective ascension.

Not a ladder. Not an escape. Not humanity trying to rise above the Earth.

A widening. A deepening. A descent into the body.

Into relationship. Into responsibility. Into awe.

The divine no longer elsewhere. The sacred no longer postponed.

Ascension may not be the moment we leave the human behind. It may be the moment we become human enough to recognise the divine in everything and everyone.

In the face before us. In the life within us. In the one we are becoming. In the one we have always been.

The harvest of the journey is not that we have arrived. The harvest is that we have become available.

Available to receive joy without mistrusting it. Available to grieve without closing. Available to love without possessing.

We will do everything we may imagine. And then, we will imagine something more.

We will follow every road that calls us. Until effort itself brings us to the place where nothing remains but surrender.

Nothing to do.

And from that nothing, the right doing begins.

Being does not withdraw us from service. Being purifies our service.

When we no longer act to become worthy, we become available for love to act through us.

Sitting with those we love and those through whom love has found us, we will celebrate the journey, honour what has been harvested, and allow ourselves the ecstasy of simply being.

Perhaps we will not ascend anywhere.

Perhaps the whole will descend into our awareness.

Perhaps we will remember that the light we have been seeking has always been looking through our eyes.

We are not gathering to become one. We are gathering because we are one.

Because we are interwoven, remembrance naturally becomes service.

And love has asked to be seen.

May you remember the light by which you seek.

May what you remember become service.

May your service become joy.

May every face return you to the whole.

May you know when to act, when to rest, when to hold, and when to release.

May you surrender the labour of becoming and allow love to live through the life already given to you.

Yo lo Creo / I believe, and so it is.