This HARVESTING LOVE Blog, is dedicated to Finding Love in Unexpected (& Expected) Places, thus releasing the energy of love into the world.
The blog’s purpose is also to treasure the gift of language, the power of giving voice.
Jewish mysticism describes the infinite One Light shattering into fragments. These shards of divine Light and Love are often concealed. It is our sacred duty—the most important of all human tasks—to find and free these divine sparks, thus restoring unity.
But what does it mean to free divine sparks?
When we are moved by the beauty of the sunset, listen with gratitude and awe to the ocean surf or to a piece of music, when we cherish a child’s question or savor a bite of food, we are freeing the light and love abiding in these forms.
To give our true attention to the beauty and mystery of creation is a sacred purpose of being alive. To be present to all that is, releases the energy of love and light into the world.
Divine Sparks are not only present in beauty and harmony. Love is also hidden in anger, fear and other shells that harden around the at once exquisitely vulnerable and powerful human heart. Beneath the anger of a friend or stranger is the yearning for love. If we respond with further anger or resentment, we harden the shell around the tender essence of being. When we greet the pain of another with loving compassion, we free the love in ourselves, in others, and the world.
In our forgetting, we experience ourselves as fragments, which is the source of our fear, of war and destruction. We are here to remind each other, to reflect each other back in love.
Giving voice, communicating, is a sacred way to free love. We build bridges between our seemingly separate islands of being. Language can illumine, can help us dissolve the fear that we are alone.
For years, if not all my life, I have been engaged, without knowing it, in the Kabbalistic practice of finding and freeing divine sparks, often hidden where one might not expect to find them. A primary way that I have done this is through writing—writing to illumine my feelings, to express wonder and gratitude, to bring light to confusion and pain, to make meaning out of chaos—and all along, to unveil the love I perceived at the heart of even the most difficult of situations.
What if we are actually weaving light and love with our words, the love and light that we are?
You will find here musings, photos, snippets of conversation, word paintings, the words of others, recordings, videos and various other forms of love and light harvested in the course of daily life. I invite you to add to the harvest in the comments section beneath posts.
In closing, a toast. L’Chaim, “to life.” To seeing love everywhere and becoming its reflection!
Yours in the joy of creating,
Ani
G'Mar Chatima Tova
I close with this customary greeting whose literal meaning is: "a good final sealing." I will add to that: May you know the love of which you are made. What better than to know this?
With gratitude,
Ani
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Well said.
Thank you, Devin, for reading and replying!
To speak of what is truly unnameable is the proverbial pointing of the finger at the moon. At the heart of my joy in writing is being with these sacred vessels known as words, as I invite light and love to flow through me and them gracefully. I suspect you know whereof I speak.
Warmly,
Ani