Love Is at the Center of What We Cast Out

At the center of every human heart, there is love. Nowhere has our concept of a reality split caused greater suffering than in the notion that even one human heart could be devoid of love. That evil could dwell at its center. That anyone, anywhere, is beyond redemption and that the solution is ever to withhold love.

A heart with its teeth bared is a hungry heart. A heart feeding on pain, violence, and transgression is a heart that will eat refuse to stay alive. It is an impoverished heart, crawling the ghettoized realms of consciousness. Not because of some immutable black-hearted constitution but because this is what happens to what is not brought into the fold. The narrative insists they failed to assimilate rather than that the larger failed to integrate, to grow wide enough to distribute love to the outermost reaches. To deliver love on the terms of those who need it, not through demands that they prove their worthiness by betraying their own soul.

This is true of the cravings we have sectioned off within ourselves—the addiction, compulsion, violent impulses, and wrath. That which appears monstrous holds within its heart beauty untold. Likewise, those we cast to the margins of society are not devoid of love but rather love unrecognized, abandoned to the outskirts of the heart.

We have closed off the arteries of love, not in adherence to the gold of all alchemy, the golden rule that undergirds all faith—to love thy neighbor as thyself—but in contradiction to it. To truly love is to recognize that each of us longs to be seen in the way we uniquely receive love. The pilgrimage of the heart is not toward greater domestication but toward liberation.

To feed the hungry what we would reserve for the saviors.

To honor the scarlet letter women with the honor we would offer the men who worship virgins. 

To house the perpetrators what we would reserve for the priests.

To intoxicate the junkies with the love we would reserve for the gods.

To the hungry animals we would starve or cage and call beasts and give them the freedom and care we would give the men given dominion over them.

We will know the truth of life, that lies in our very breath, when we empty what is full and fill what is empty.  Not because the inhale is doing the exhale any great gift, but because each needs the other for the whole to survive.