The Real of Love. Part Two
with two poems
This is a transcribed Dharma talk given 2 August 2026 at the Waldhaus Buddhist Zentrum near Koblenz, Germany. I edited and adjusted the talk for readability.
This next poem carries a personal note. Sometimes we fall in love strongly, immediately, unexpectedly, perhaps with someone whom we met for the first time, or perhaps we knew the person for months or longer. Suddenly love grows in powerful ways.
This love lands with a declaration. One feels no concern at all about that person’s history. The love of the person as they present themselves in that moment carries more power than anything known or unknown about their past. This poem attempts to communicate this kind of romantic love.
Title of Poem: An Invitation to Walk About Within
The poem speaks from the person who has fallen in love, offering an invitation to the other to walk about within himself or herself.
I don’t care men and women let you down I don’t care; broken trust became your name I don’t care; snide comments were thrown around I don’t care what you have long disdained. Or you hide your secrets when words complain disputes and fights, reactions to what they said or have spent years in someone else’s bed. Your power makes you act; you play your part such anguish, woes, and hurt you have fought I felt you walk much more around my heart you stroll around to visit caves you sought, you peer at my forgotten corners on the chart. You pluck my strings and dance alone inside And breathe your soul into what I can’t hide. Let’s trust, and find out what you can see and touch when you walk around my inner life so much.
Sometimes love brings trust, sharing and invitation. Through love, we discover that trust, opening an invitation for the other to look into us, into corners of our mind we rarely show.
We look into our mind to discover who we truly have become. That looking helps to draw something authentic out of our being. We release a merging of trust and love co-exist together to share from a foundation of wisdom. We know someone can listen to us, and someone can hear us fully.
The response arrives supportive, and something freeing and liberating happens because trust enabled it to occur. We hold deep interest in this kind of trust, which can emerge in romantic life, friendship, and other expressions metta. This proves not unusual at all, though it requires vigilance, a watchfulness to preserve love as a sacred element of human experience.
Love genuinely holds sacredness in its precious nature, yet it stays fragile too. This is deeply human. We find this fragility in ourselves, in others, the arts and the dance of daily life.
Love and fear of loss, Love and worry
What I have in mind here concerns how we associate problematic mind states with love. Sometimes we say to ourselves, or to another, “I love this person so much; I feel afraid of losing him (or her, or other).”
We say, “I love this person so much, I end up worrying about them.”
Some say, “This person loves me. The person also wants much from me as well. When they want more of my love that becomes a burden.” That wanting is not love. It is wanting, a form of neediness.
“If I didn’t love this person, I wouldn’t cling to them, wouldn’t start feeling needy.”
We ask ourselves, “Why do I feel like this?” Our words fall into a problematic language concluding love causes suffering.
Clinging and worry have nothing to do with love. Love does not cause fear; it does not cause worry. Love cannot do that. Such suffering falls outside its domain, outside what remains possible for love.
If love truly caused us so many fears , worries and anxieties, the solution would prove simple: stop loving. That would end all the suffering wrapped around love. We could become an AI walking around like a robot - a machine. Love remains sacred, precious, though it rarely exists alone. Other tendencies accompany it, tendencies that easily masquerade as love’s fault.
Let us refuse to make love the cause of why we worry about our children, why we think so much about our aged parents and feel anxious about our losing the job we love to AI. Love bears no relationship to mental suffering. Can we work instead with these tendencies, which keep making errors of judgment that tie us to habits and patterns obstructing love?
Let love stay pristine, kept pure, with a clarity of graciousness. As human beings, we can see clearly so that love remains love. When we experience departure from it, we recognise the departure for what it is - an unresolved tendency.
We need to show great care when we say to ourselves, or to another, “I love my kids so much,” or “I love my lover so much.”
You may believe in this heartfelt view. Stay aware that we do not love this person constantly, every moment. Be honest. I haven’t met anybody who loves somebody all the time; if you know such a person, send me an email, and I will go anywhere to kiss their feet. We experience the presence of love and the absence of love.
This absence need not turn into anger, fear, or withdrawal. Sometimes love becomes inaccessible. This body of teaching recognises and appreciates love while also recognising that absence of it occurs too. Even in absence, patience serves better than pointing fingers at oneself or at somebody else due to lack of love. Such gaps in friendship, loving kindness and love belong naturally to the rhythms and flows of life. This confirms the real of love.
Within this exploration, we sometimes fall into the habit of treating love as a matter of the heart alone, yet love proves far too large to reduce it to the parameters of the heart. If we rely on the heart for confirmation of love, then, frankly, may you experience good luck with that approach.
Consider the mother with a little baby who wakes in the middle of the night. The mother holds her baby and rocks the baby back to sleep, even though she doesn’t feel like it since she is so tired.
Nshorna, my daughter became pregnant aged 18. She had three more children. On a Saturday night in her 20s, she would sometimes go clubbing with her mates, her “girlies” as she calls them. The children stayed with me. In the middle of the night, one child would climb into my bed. Then the other two would come. I would tell my daughter the next day, “Darling, I’ve just survived a night of domestic abuse; one child sat on my face, another clambered all over me” while another was kicking me in their sleep. Despite all this, love prevails amidst the irritation of a night of broken sleep.
I offer these as everyday examples showing love’s many faces: powerful and strong at times, soft and gentle at others, sometimes absent. That absence does not have to pose a problem; thus not needing any correction.
In certain situations , we could not act if we relied solely on the heart. The feeling of love may not arise. A knowing arises that carries a power, a movement toward action independent of feelings. Let me offer an example with some extended detail.
My annual visits to Palestine spanned from 1992 to 2019. Entering Palestine for a few days sometimes went without hassle at the various checkpoints, but during an Intifada (Uprising) it grew harder. I gave workshops to activists in Palestine to leave behind violence, what they called armed struggle, to find non-violent strategies instead. I also gave workshops to support suffering mothers such as those whose husbands the IDF (Israeli army) assassinated in front of them and their small children.
IDF arrested teenage sons of mothers for throwing stones. Soldiers would take them away without word for months, leaving mothers sick with worry. Low-flying fighter planes deliberately terrorised children and parents over Nablus at night, leaving parents to cope with nightmares, bedwetting, and trauma of their children. Suffering. Suffering. Suffering.
I questioned whether I truly wanted to do this work. In Nablus, the main town of the West Bank, sometimes I never saw a single Westerner, not from an aid charity, international organisation or diplomat from a foreign government. Their organisations and embassies did not wish to take risks with their staff. I preferred to work alone rather than depend upon the backing of an organisation.
The Palestinians took wonderful care of me. Sometimes they were concerned I might get kidnapped by Islamic Jihad or Hamas, occasionally hiding me in the car as we passed through areas in an around Nablus whispering, “Keep your head down, Christopher, keep low.” This work carried love, though not always accompanied by feelings in the heart; it simply felt necessary. I share this not to boast but to illustrate the point. Love transcends feelings as well as embracing them.
Steps in daily life
In daily life too, speaking up rarely feels easy. We voice concern. Taking a risk, never comes easily. Some of you in this hall face a workplace situation where your boss behaves as an authoritarian, bullying, manipulative, putting staff down and giving them a hard time, calling indivuals passive-aggressive and more. You know you must say something. You ask others about their experience. They confirm they get treated in the same way.” Nobody speaks up. They fear they will lose job. HR (Human Resources) fails to act.
The thought arises “I want to leave. I must get myself out of here,” That response may prove appropriate. Love can convey a different voice – a willingness to take risks, to speak up even when others beg, “Don’t mention my name, I don’t want more problems, I’m just trying to keep under the radar. I don’t want to lose my job or get ignored for promotion.”
Certain individuals in this Dharma hall consider speaking up despite the possible outcome. This might invite criticism, fault-finding and negativity towards themselves. Their voice may cost them their job. Integrity is love. Pursuit of justice is love.
Some will speak up anyway, without feeling like it at all. Why did they speak up? Perhaps they didn’t want whoever replaced them to endure the same treatment. People speak up regardless of the cost. Whistleblowers deserve our reverence; they take genuine risks with their future, their liberty and some flee their country Such people are the gods who walk among us.
Poem Three
Let me turn now to a poem called Tears of a Yogi. The Buddha once remarked, perhaps as metaphor, perhaps a mild exaggeration, that the tears human beings have shed fill the great ocean.
I have thought a few times this might hold true . I recall tears of a yogi – a meditator in the Dharma all in a subtropical rainforest near The Channon, New South Wales, Australia. Friends who work as environmentalists constructed the hall, kitchen and huts entirely from fallen trees, refusing to cut down living ones, which meant considerable extra work cutting up fallen timber and searching further afield for material. Their conviction showed love for trees.
During one retreat, I witnessed a woman shedding many tears over the crisis in her relationship. Earlier we had our earlier one-to-one session together. Her damn burst in the next sitting in the meditation hall.
Title of Poem: Tears of a Yogi
I sit opposite tears, co-joined, with wet cheeks like long, slow raindrops on panes of glass I look across to witness her sadness speak of quietness, innocence, breath does pass comfort, silence, no words to tweak. I see her sorrow held in story old, inner process of long sorrows deem a heartache pressed upon her life untold, so she dwells alone in such extreme. A sigh emerges, and the tears then halt, at no cost she finds rest now, peace fills her heart flown I feel her presence, soul of past seasons lost her breath now softens, body rests alone, a passing dam of tears and loss atoned. Abiding stillness, our eyes open to look I say no word, observe, offer no clue I sense her heartache and the tears that shook she makes no move, she knows what she went through she said later she felt a love so true.
Sometimes, we human beings pass through sobs and silence, and out of that passage, we recognise an authentic love running through.
A valuable practice involves noticing the small expressions of love, friendship, or kindness that emerge during the day. Sometimes we hold the privilege of witnessing this from others. You see the gestures from yourselves, from the staff here, from the teacher, from visitors. Let us keep our hearts, eyes, and ears genuinely open.
One important aspect of this recognition and deep appreciation involves its power to shift a despairing view of life. A despairing view of current life, or of the current state of the world, leaves us handicapped emotionally and mentally, repeating to others our despair of life on Earth, conflict, war, and more. In such despair we become crippled, as surely crippled as somebody who has lost the use of their legs. We become weighed down until we can no longer respond.
Let us recognise the presentations, gestures, manifestations of love around us. Genuine love touches us, protects us from despair, from feeling overwhelmed by living in this world. The world itself does not lack love; plenty of love exists within it, but human beings must recognise it, sense it, acknowledge it.
With that power of love, we take steps toward wise action, boldness, speaking up, and serving humanity, creatures, and the natural world. Love holds a power that despair, cynicism, and hopelessness cannot match.
Let us keep our being open in the days we spend here together. Keep this awareness alive elsewhere too. Let us share a quiet minute together.
May all beings know the real of love.
May all beings recognise infinite expressions of love
May all beings know the power of love to guide our actions.
Love
Christopher