The Communion of Hello Love

I was listening to Sofia Diaz and Diane Musho Hamilton Sensei this morning on a conference call. They spoke of autonomy and communion. I was taking notes and breathing and enjoying the Saturday morning cool. In the side bar, I wrote: "Hello Love is communion." It is the dance of merging. Just for a moment. We are all autonomous and individualistic. We know how to separate and create. But Hello Love reminds us that we also know how to MERGE. We know how to breathe beyond our comfort zone and into something much larger and life giving.

This poem by Czeslaw Milosz captures this communing:

Love
 
Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills.
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn't matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn't always understand.
 
 
(New & Collected Poems 1931-2001)


We stand in the glow of ripeness in our moments of Hello Love and we have no idea whom we serve in doing so.
It is a chain of goodness that begins the moment we dare connect.

Big love.

The Hello Love Experiment - CHAPTER TWO

It's been an amazing month. The Hello Love Experiment is ready for its next unfolding. It's remarkable how the energy starts to swirl around a new intention. I've been talking about the Hello Love Experiment again with renewed passion and commitment and suddenly I'm receiving phone calls and emails and offers of help. Friends and strangers are reminding me of the power of these two little words.








Chapter Two of Hello Love is a kind of Back to Basics.

Here's what I'm going to do:
1) Talk about Hello Love wherever and whenever I can
2) Practice Hello Love daily
3) Remind everyone how SIMPLE the practice is:

a. Meet someone's eyes
b. Say "Hello Love" -- silently or not
c. See what happens
d. Repeat

And finally

4) Create a Hello Love Day that will be celebrated across the world in 2010. I will choose point people across the globe that will decide how to practice hello love in their community and we will all share the results of our simultaneous experiment!

As with any labor of love, there are many moments of questioning. Does this work? Will this work? How can I invest more fully? Am I crazy? But thankfully these days, there are even more moments of great JOY and a profound inner knowing that this is exactly the work I must do.

And there's lots of work to do! So, if you want to be a part of growing the Hello Love Experiment, let me know!

BIG LOVE to you all.

Hello Love in Prison

This story came from a wonderful woman in Arizona who has been experimenting with Hello Love for several years now. She always checks in with us to see what is developing and has been amazing about supporting our efforts. The following story is what Hello Love is all about:

Back in 1998, after reading the book Conversations with God, Book 1, I
attended several retreats facilitated by the author, Neale Donald Walsch.
At the second retreat one of the women present stood up and said that
because the author had been receiving numerous requests from inmates in
prisons around the country who had read this book and desperately wanted to
correspond with like-minded folks about the different ideas and concepts
from the book and about spirituality in general. So Walsch and his
foundation, ReCreation, started Books for Friends, to send hundreds more of
these books to prisons and then to match up inmates' names with people on
the outside who were willing to discuss myriad spiritual and metaphysical
concepts with them. I was one of those people who chose to do this and have
been doing so since 1998.
One of my inmate friends is housed in a prison in Florida and I have
been corresponding with him for about ten years. Last year I told him all
about the Hello Love Experiment and sent him your Home page. Shortly
thereafter he wrote, saying it sounded like such a wonderful idea.
But yesterday I got a letter from him that showed the Hello Love
Experiment in action, and here are his words:
"I must share with you how I handled the situation I was in with a
so-called 'friend' of mine. He was angry with me and even wanted to kill
me, or so I thought. So I tried the Hello Love Experiment. I looked at him
and smiled and said 'hello love' silently and a big smile came across his
face. So we are at peace now. Thank God."


It certainly inspired me to practice more!
Love to all.