Some words, phrases, even entire messages look different through the lens of time. Take this feeling I expressed to a friend half-way around the world about the “yearning” I felt on reading Sufi poems  for the first time. It moved me so much that I “penned” my own feelings of life-long “longing” to be with, what the Sufis call, “my Beloved” — the Higher Being that can take the shape of your Most Perfect Loved One, the Divine.

I long to be with Love, and to be in love with Love.

Love for me starts with the yearning to be accepted by Love, to be “liked” and to feel that I am a part of their side, their team, their plans for now and a thousand tomorrows.

“Longing” triggers my love. It is that palpable warmth that starts to flow inside of me when I think of “being in love.” Love is delicious to the taste, but with a hint of sadness, actually a permanent, ever so slight trace of a pain. A pain that sweetly advises me that I can not always be with my Love. That I must go about the business of the world, dress the part of who I am projecting to be, and show a mask of a face that spells out strength and confidence.

The truth inside, however, is quite different. I am but a small, lonely child that stores within an abundance of free love to share with everyone, but who is afraid the love will be rejected because it is not pure enough, or that it may seem to come with strings attached, or with an ulterior motive to simply receive as much comfort for myself as I desperately want to give and to offer to comfort You.

My Love aches. It cries out for its tears to be touched, wiped away, and to be assured that this feeling will still be there the next morning when You could realize how much of a fraud I really am, a fraud unworthy to blessed with Your unbelievable reciprocal feelings.

I don’t deserve such effervescent happiness. Let me see but a smile on my Lover’s face — Your Face — a smile from the eyes, from the heart, from that vast pool of love that washes me clean, renews my resolve, and revives me as if I were a gentle flower opening to the morning sun after the heaviest night of rain, and I will be satisfied that life could now come to an end.

What more can we ask upon our death than to be in Love and know at the moment of departure that True Love was, and is, Ever more.

Michael, The Lover