Order and Chaos

Love is what organizes it all

When you lose someone you love especially when it happens abruptly and unexpectedly you are left with all the what ifs.  You are left with the imperfections of where you are, wherever you were together in the exact moment of their death. When Andres died, I immediately lost access to all the possible concrete and tangible moments to do things over and to practice what I am learning and metabolizing.  And yet the transformations, the insights reverberate through me and Andres and our relationship keeps changing, evolving, deepening with me in a physical body and he in his multidimensional form.  As a human being with skin, bones, and life experiences I want the human experience of touch, of physicality and what feels and tastes real. And yet what is real?

In Chinese medicine the heart is seen as the empress (or emperor if you prefer) because it is where your spirit resides.  The character for the heart (the symbol above) is this empty branch signifying the peace of a heart that has order and quietude.   The four branches of the heart character represent the spiritual ideal of a heart unencumbered by worry, sadness, anxiety, anger, fear, etc. The five innate virtues – order and unconditional love (heart/fire), integrity and courage (lungs/metal), deep trust (spleen/earth), compassion and kindness (liver/wood), and wisdom and inner peace (kidneys/water) can rest within the quiet order within the heart and allow us inner peace.

Often you see that the essential quality or the aspect of our inner nature represented by the heart is order.  I have always been struck by how simple and reasoned that sounded. That it boiled down a complex and rich depth to something so plain and almost rigid.  I remember many years ago my Daoist teacher and the woman who ordained me asking Andres and I what our goal was with this training.  I said what I wanted was to be able to see my own energetic boundaries and others clearly.  Her response was that my goal would require me to explore and know my own heart space deeply.  Oh how right she was.

Since that long ago conversation I have such lost beings both precious and mysterious to me to death, from my two beloved cats, Andres and my Mom and Dad.  There has been this evolving and unfolding of my understanding of what that order of the heart means and why I have come to embrace the idea of order more whole heartedly.  There is an order and reason I see through my limited human eyes shaped by my need and longing to find a tender gentle loving space to be received without condition.  And there is something bigger than me that is also me.  Like a kernel of knowing that resides in my heart that has space for everything – the seemingly good, the seemingly bad, the painful, the wonder, and everything in between.

 That kernel is gold.  And I have protected it in different ways in my life.  I have shut it down, frozen shut at times so that few or any (especially me) have had access.  I have also offered it out, hand outstretched to anyone who might take me up on my offer.  Neither worked very well.  Each had its own set of complications and heart break.  The pressure of the trapped longing when I shut it down, served to break my heart open painful and necessary, And when I offered myself indiscriminately I shut it back down painful and necessary. I have explored the two poles of frozen and wide open to figure out what the right resonance of balance between free and boundaried feels like in my day to day life and relationships.

And yet that tiny kernel contains infinite space.  When Andres was teaching qi gong and the five shen (5 organ systems of herat, spleen, lungs, kidneys, and liver), he always used the phrase, the infinite space within each organ (think of your organs).  The interdimensional space within each of us, within our organs is the seat of these essential aspects of our inner nature and is so vast, big, infinite, and yet as I sit in the crazy mix of emotions that come with grief,, each one seems to be a portal to the center of that space.

There are other words used to describe the essential nature of the heart are Love, unconditional love, inner peace, forgiveness.  The acquired emotion of the heart, or rather the emotion that I, that we all experience that is shaped by what it is like to be in physical form, of bones, skin, tendons, blood is called chaos, shock, overexcitement. I know what it is like to experience that chaos, that shock of having everything you thought you knew and understood blown open, scattered in the wind, unable to gather them back to the order that organized my understanding of myself, of others, of the inner and outer world. Or I thought I understood it. And then Andres died.

When I found out Andres was dead, that knowledge reverberated through every cell in my being.  In the moment, all I could do was say it over and over, each time I repeated trying to gauge what that statement resonated with inside me and finding nothing familiar I could grasp.  It blew apart any last shred of tangible, of form, of concrete to hold onto and left me to reorganize myself, making conscious choices of how I want to participate and how I want to use my life force energy.  To determine on act on what resonates and aligns with peace, order, quietude for me.

I currently think that the spark of our Divinity that is our true core nature perches in the heart, maybe it is the meeting point, the distillation of the part of us that is physical form and the part that it is infinite into that kernel of gold.  How much or how little we are willing or able to share of that fluctuates all the time.  But inside that Divinity is an ever spiraling and expanding and evolving LOVE that has the capacity to hold everything.  The whole is bigger than the sum of its parts because the capacity it can hold is infinite. Divine order and the lens the human eye needs to behold requires a limitlessness we can not achieve solely with bones, skin, tendon, blood, and ligament alone. 

The love is what breathes life into the tangible physical part of us, of our form. The minute our brain starts to catalog reason and understand it we lose that vast knowing of Divine order in an instant. We can only hold that knowing within the sacred container that is our form, that is our bone, skin, tendon, ligament, blood, and blood vessels and allow it to infuse us and organize us with something we can not quantify or even explain. And yet we all try.  It is why I write and why I started this substack to provide space for us all to try and to offer our own attempts to touch it and see it and support each other in these explorations.

In the Daoist understanding of our heart mind or physical form, our self love is the foundation for this Divine order of the heart and what the Divine order gives birth to is our trust in ourselves and our trust in that Divine order. That kernel of gold is not something to be reduced down to physical form. Love, our heart, is what organizes all of this chaos into sacred space and makes sense of it and is beyond the capacity of our brain or mind to hold. And yet I will continue to try to alchemize these experiences so that the capacity of my conscious mind continues to evolve and hold this BIG LOVE, and I allow it to guide me to the next truest step.

Thank for taking a leap with me here.  I look forward to the next time.