Matthew McKay - Love in the Time of Impermanence

To the memory of Ralph Metzner, who taught me how to channel.

And to my wife, Jude,who every day shows me how to love.

LOVE
in the Time of Impermanence

This is a beautiful and thought-provoking exposition of the fleeting nature of love and the necessary work on ourselves and in our connections with others that we must maintain for love to thrive and endure.

DR. L. EDUARDO CARDONA-SANCLEMENTE, AUTHOR OF AYURVEDA FOR DEPRESSION

This is a delicious book. If you dont know what true love is, you will by the time you finish this book. If youre blessed to know love, you will savor every familiar morsel. In either case, the practical meditations will give you the tangible experience of the deep wisdom shared here.

SUZANNE GIESEMANN, AUTHOROF MESSAGES OF HOPE

Matt McKay has devoted his life to being a healer of the hurting in his thoughts, words, and deeds. He has walked the talk in his compassionate counseling as a clinical psychologist; and he has talked the walk as a lecturer and prodigious writer. When his son, Jordan, died tragically, Matt had the courage to step through the veil and enter into a cosmological dialogue with his son. In his latest work, Love in the Time of Impermanence, he offers the distillation of their joint wisdom in an articulate and comprehensive examination of the origin and motivating force behind all life, namely love. Jordan is proud of you, Matt.

SEN LAOIRE,PH.D., COFOUNDER AND SPIRITUAL DIRECTOR OF COMPANIONSOF THE JOURNEY

Contents

INTRODUCTION

Love Lives On

Death is the mother of beauty.

WALLACE STEVENS

E verything we know and count on and love is impermanent. That truth crashed down on me in 2008. On an early autumn day that year I learned that my twenty-three-year-old son had died.

Though Jordan was gone, though I could no longer hold him or hear his voice, my love for him remained a living thing. It nourished me and kept me going. It was a blanket that protected me from emptiness and nihilism.

I wondered at loves strength, its unwillingness to die with the body, its resilience in the face of every kind of change and loss this world can throw at us. And I wondered what love actually is, what its made of. What do we mean, I questioned, when we say we love something? Why, for some, does love die or disappear, while for others even death has no dominion over their love?

As a psychologist and couples therapist for more than forty years, I have witnessed the death of love. Many times. I have seen how emotional pain deadens the will and desire to express love. How it turns caring into anger and contempt. But I have also seen how we can learn to love in the face of monstrous pain and loss. I have learned how some keep love alive in the crushing maw of impermanence.

That is the purpose of this book: to learn to know what love is and how to keep iteven when you hurt, even when things are taken, even as you walk daily in the shadow of uncertainty.

Love in the Time of Impermanence grew from years of seeking and exploration after Jordans death. But it also came from our living relationshipand from Jordan himself. I learned to talk to him in spirit. For more than a dozen years I have channeled and learned from my son in the afterlife. The books Seeking Jordan and The Luminous Landscape of the Afterlife are distillations of hundreds of conversations between us. The book you are now reading is a collaboration. Jordans words are offset in boxes and offer the wisdom of a soul who has lived many lives and who understands our fate of love and loss.

We offer this book to you so that whatever changes, whatever is taken or lost, your love will live and be untouched.

What Love Is

L ove is the most important thing on Earth. Its what all of us seek. We build our families, as best we can, on a foundation of love. Our most valued relationships have love at their core. Our communities, even our countries, are held together with love. And our connection to God, or the Divine, is often described as love itself. Yet for all its power and centrality, love is hard to describe much less define. The idea of love seems at once too ephemeral to hold but also too big to corral with language. And when we try to describe it, we are often forced into greeting card clichs because love is conflated with experinces of harmony, romance, sexual pleasure, and joy. Yet love is none of those things.

At its root, love is just one thing. It is relationship itself. It is the connective tissue that binds us together, that creates oneness and belonging. It is a gravitational force that connects you to friends, colleagues, family (blood and genetics dont connect families), a community, a land, and all there is (the Divine). And love isnt the emotion or pleasure you take in those connectionslove is the connection itself.

All of our core values, the things we hold dear, derive from loveof self, of others, or of the Divine. If you examine what truly matters to you, what your life is about, love is the force behind all of it. For example, all efforts at self-improvement, at personal growth and learning, are motivated by love of self. Everything you do to build and support your relationships is driven by love of others. The work you do and the people your work serves can be a reflection of love. Creativity is an act of love; the appreciation of beauty is an act of love; the great pleasures of the body (athletics, food, music, dance, sexual expression) can all be acts of love. And spiritualitythe awareness that we belong to each other and to allis born from love.

We arrive in this world naked and alone, suffering amnesia for our place of origin. What starts to heal that aloneness is love. Love from and for our caregivers; love of a place, of familiar rooms and streets; love of proximate souls whom we are drawn to; love of experiences that bring us joy. The threads connecting us to everything outside of self are made of this same quest for entanglement. Our survival in this difficult place depends on seeing and acting on love.

In the same way plants are heliotropicalways moving toward the sunwe are amortropic, orienting always toward attachment and love. This amortropic orientation reflects a basic law of quantum physics: our world does not have separability; objects that have ever interacted are forever entangled. What happens to one soul entangled by love affects the other. Forever. No matter how far apart in space or time they may be. So we are drawn toward each other by love and once entangled, remain so forever. This is the source of all connection.

LOVES OPPOSITE

Knowing a things opposite can illuminate the thing itself. If the essence of love is connecting, the opposite of love must be the severing of connection. Hate cant be the opposite of love because hate is a form of relationship. Theres a painful but deep connection between those who hate one another. Selfishness is sometimes thought to be the opposite of love. But the focus on self doesnt block relationship; it merely distorts it into serving only the self.