I Am Love

I invite you to say it quietly inside. "I Am Love." Close your eyes, relax the muscles in your belly, breathe in a long yet gentle breath. Then as you breathe out, say it deeply. I don't tell you, I invite you, only if it feels right. "I Am Love."

Our Creator plants this song in every heart. Not "I love you," but "I Am Love."

"I love you" is possessive, contracting the heart with a silent demand for private attention. But "I Am Love" expands the heart with a love that makes no claim upon its object. Indeed, "I Am Love" has no object. It is the song of the Self, the all-pervading subjectivity, the triumph of cosmic person-hood.

Only because our being cries, "I Am Love," is "I love you" possible. Maybe we don't listen to this song because we're afraid of being consumed in the fire of love's unity.

I desperately want to individualize myself. I attempt to articulate my own personal voice. This feels like a worthy enterprise at first, yet it arises from incomplete understanding.

My "individualism" can be as self-limiting as it is expressive. "Individualism" is a subtle form of fear: fear that my ego might dissolve. I fear falling back into raw unprocessed love, the consuming fire of love before "I," love before duty or devotion, primordial love exploding as the light source of my original innocence.

What would happen if I let go of my anxiety about being "original" and "individual"? Even for a few moments, moments of deep meditation, what if I allow the voice of my little "me" to be quiet, and I sink into my real originality, the first Word of creation, "I Am Love"?

No worry. I discover that God's Word of Love articulates me far more creatively than I could articulate myself. This song, "I Am Love," sings me as the ocean raises a wave, as a diamond sparkles one facet of its infinite beauty. The more I surrender to the One, the more I become uniquely Me. This is the secret of divine Love.

A glimmer of sunlight on the sea does not worry about whether it lives an instant or a thousand years. It sparkles and dissolves, sparkles and dissolves, ever born, ever dying. Each glimmer is utterly unique, yet part of one sun.

How does my heart beat? "I Am Love." How does my breath breathe? "I Am Love." Maybe the world gets dark, maybe I suffer illusion and fear, because I forget to begin by loving myself?

Sing it 777 thousand times a day: "I Am Love." Through this song all creatures keep creating themselves, so that they can do God's work. Even a fly sings, "I Am Love" and becomes a fly.

Only we humans are vain enough to imagine that loving ourselves is a problem. Who could I love if every cell of my blood, flesh, bone and marrow were not the ocean of Love? Who could I love if each proton in each atom of my body did not sing, "I am made out of Love!"

Whisper it, friend, first like a secret, then like a bell on a temple, then like a storm that carries everything away.