Between the fires and being sick, I missed a whole month of Dance Tribe up in Santa Barbara. Something was developing there – one of the women had taken to saying that we needed to “take the energy shared here and bring it into the world that needs it so much.”

At the end of dance, I am pretty extended. Specific messages tend to bounce away. I took it as something just nice to say, but when I last heard it, I realized that she might have been speaking to me. Pausing therefore to reflect, I recognized this paradox: if I bring energy into that room, it’s because I am reaching out into the world while we dance. Powers ancient and new, distant and near, reflect upon and affirm our engagement.

If we raise a special energy, it’s because the world is in the room with us.

But that’s nothing new – that’s been going on for me in many venues for many years.

What is new is this: stepping out of the darkened corridor into the sunshine, and feeling this joyful glow descend upon me. It’s like a friend offering a warm embrace. I reach up and brush the sky with its welcoming.

There is a panicked impatience in that engagement. We haven’t had any rain to speak of in Southern California. The ecosystem is drying out, burning up and blowing away.

As I walked down to the beach this morning, those perceptions crystalized around the Fall. Love always hopes, and to protect Adam and Eve, God hid his knowledge of what was to come. So I read his words in Eden not as those of a taciturn school master, but of a parent seeking children lost in the jungle.

Adam? Eve? Where are you?

Followed by the admonition:

You will die.

Death is the veil that separates us from love, so I do not read the second as a punishment. It is a simple statement of fact. Without understanding, when Adam and Eve covered themselves – when they made the choice to hide from God, who is love perfected – they were choosing to take refuge in death.

This great weight settled on me then – the weight of sorrow that so much of humanity rejects God, and so rejects love. The paradox is that we cannot dispel God’s love. Even if we seek it in other relationships, we are just asking God’s love to come through the door of our choosing. No, the only way to reject love is to reject ourselves. It is to surrender ourselves to death.

And this is what tears at me now: to walk around the world and see all these people dead to themselves.

Man does not live by bread alone. We cannot reject love without rejecting ourselves, for to be a self is to be loved unconditionally. It is to be seen by God.

And I realize now that this is what confuses the hell out of women. I walk around and offer “Here. You’ve lost this part of your self.” It’s always the part that they surrendered when they lost faith in love, and in finding it returned they resolve that I must be the love for them.

No. I’m just relaying the message that God never stopped loving you.

This has been playing itself out in a little triangle, and I realize that I don’t know any longer how to receive love in the fashion of the world. The compromises and barriers confuse the hell out of me.

The crescendo came tonight while watching Amelie. The denoument is incredibly tender. Love ambushes the poor girl, and she has sufficient faith to submit.

Does that remain in me?

I laid on the floor and wept.