From: Zack Rosen
Sent: Sunday, December 28, 2008 12:05 AM
To: Tovie
Josefina,
It is SO good to to read your beautiful, beautiful words. I feel like I just woke up from a long nap. Love is a wonderful thing. We played another show last night, and when I arrived at Dan’s house to go down to the gig, Carrie was sitting on his lap; they were both glowing. They were so surrendered to each other and just radiating good vibes, touching everyone around them with their love. It was so wonderful to spend time with them yesterday, and it is so wonderful to hear stories about you and Jaime. I found what you said about sitting by the ocean and seeing all the crabs and the black hole and Jaime’s words so, so beautiful. Rumi uses the ocean as an image for spiritual experience. When I was in Fire Island over the summer, I was walking along the beach with my whole band and started listening to the sound of the ocean, and I really understood for the first time why he uses that image. As you said, pain and pleasure are not just troughs and crests, but one integral body, the whole ocean, the unknown. When we’re able to face the unknown, we let the ocean wash over us.
Facing the unknown can be so hard at times though, because we’re so tied to certainty. And when others challenge us to confront the unknown in and through them, sometimes that can be scary. It’s so much easier to make our relationships narrow and predictable. I felt like I opened up to the unknown for the first time in my life earlier this year, and my relationship with you helped me to do that. Thank you so much for that. I’ve realized that wholeness, or openness, or emptiness, comes and goes. I trivialize it by imagining I could experience it all the time. But back to love. I remember in one of the first conversations I had with Mary, she was talking about being present, and she said that being present was like being in love. She said that when you’re in love with someone, you accompany them wherever you go, and being present was like accompanying yourself. Being around or hearing about people who are in love reminds me of that.
And there are so many kinds of love. Romance is love, friendship is love, spiritual experience is love, taking a walk is love, playing music is love, dancing is love, cooking is love, eating is love. I think love just means giving all of myself to something or someone. Everything that’s really meaningful in life has to do with that. In that book Pharmako Gnosis that I left in the living room in the house, there’s a really beautiful quote that I’ve been thinking about a lot. I’ll show it to you when we get back, but the gist of it is: “Every experience you have is exactly what you need.” It reminds me of something Gideon said to me the other week. He said that the last time he was in Israel, it was during a period when there was intense fighting with Lebanon, and he was hanging out with a friend of his who was going to be in the army next year. There were all kinds of bombings near them. His friend would always come back to something a medieval rabbi had written, which was: God is everywhere; therefore, have no fear. We think that love comes and goes, but actually it’s there the whole time. It’s like what you said about pain and pleasure. It seems like troughs and crests, but it’s also just one integral body, the ocean.
…
At long last, I’ve found an excerpt of a Rumi poem that I think is appropriate:
‘Lo, I am with you always’ means when you look for God,
God is in the look of your eyes,
in the thought of looking, nearer to you than your self,
or things that have happened to you
There’s no need to go outside.
Be melting snow.
Wash yourself of yourself.
A white flower grows in the quietness.
Let your tongue become that flower.
With love,
Zack