May 1st: I Forgot That Love Existed
For this week's Friday music, Van Morrison's "I Forgot That Love Existed" is on my mind--with the very great quatrain:
"If my heart could do my thinkin'
And my head begin to feel
I could look upon the world anew
And know what's really real."
When we think with our heads without feeling, when we live inside our cut-off minds in everyday life peering out at the world from a withdrawn space of detachment and disconnection, we actually cannot perceive the reality of the longing within ourselves and everyone else to see and embrace one another in the fullness of mutual recognition. But when we can think with our hearts and suddenly see the great beauty and humanity in each person around us, and sometimes their tragedy as well, a transfiguring may occur within us, our drifty detachment may emulsify, and we may suddenly feel here with each other in a new way.
Or as I put it drawing from my own experience of the social movements of the 1960s when I remembered that love existed, "We suddenly experience ourselves as actually existing, the world fills out like a great balloon of horizontal presence and mutuality, and the spiritual radiance that had previously been contained through collective social withdrawal suddenly becomes visible, illuminated." (The Desire for Mutual Recognition, pg. 4 discussing this very song)