This morning I’m with the words of Rumi: Love is not an emotion. It is your very existence.

Last night I lay in bed unable to sleep because I felt the truth of Rumi’s words.  All is Love. It’s my very existence.

My mother used to say.  “All is love”, and my father, “All is play.”

I’m with that now balancing grief and my to-do list on love and play.  

When I went through my Rosen training, Frank Ottiwell, an Alexander Technique teacher, came to lead and teach.  People in the Rosen community have been reminiscing about him. I remember watching him lengthen his fingers. He allowed and gave space between the bones.  

An Alexander imagery technique is to imagine your sacrum has lungs and let your sacrum breathe.  I do that now as I look at my list of things to do and honor the privilege of doing them one by one.

In doing so, I’m with the words of Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor. He writes of one way he survived a concentration camp. Obviously I’m not comparing my life to his, but sometimes grief can be a heavy load to lift. We need a fulcrum; we need tools.

Viktor Frankl: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.

We were at work in a trench. The dawn was grey around us; grey was the sky above; grey the snow in the pale light of dawn; grey the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and grey their faces. I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria. “Et lux in tenebris lucet” — and the light shineth in the darkness. For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground. The guard passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with my beloved. More and more I felt that she was present, that she was with me; I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong: she was there. Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch, and looked steadily at me.

I feel support knowing my brother is here, in the light, the birds, the sky, the trees.