Put real passion in your coupling

Jack was an IBM executive with pictures that revealed a life well lived. We were standing in the home of his son John as the pictures faded, fragmented and reformed in the digital display. Pictures of children and grandchildren, cars and cruises — from California to Key West — formed a slide show helping us to remember this man’s life.

His wife, Carole, commented each time a particular image rolled around, “That’s him, that’s when I said, ‘Yes, I’ll marry you.’” With piercing eyes and a square jaw, the girls would all coo and reply, “look how handsome.”

Jack and Carole had been married for 60 years when he passed over to glory last week. The wake was a retelling of a loving life illustrated in pictures and in people.

Rumi, a poet who wrote centuries ago, often wrote about love. He wrote with a mystic’s eye and a lover’s heart. Jack was that kind of lover, and shared a beautiful life with Carole, teaching children and friends alike to live passionately.

Our challenge is to find and live in passion. Rumi said that once we enter the room, smell the wine musk aroma and taste the elixir of love, we never want to leave.

In the documentary, “Buck,” about the original horse whisperer, Buck Brannaman describes the same feeling. He describes the experience of horse and rider when trust and communication resolve into blissful union. When synced up and corralling a cow the dance becomes sublime. He says of that moment, “If you ever get there, you never want to leave it.”

He says more about this experience. “Like one mind and one body, if you get a taste of it, if you get a taste of what I’m talking about, you couldn’t get enough of it, you’d rather do that than anything.”

And finally he says, “you may spend your whole life chasing this, that’s possible. But it’s a good thing to chase.”

Jack and Carole had found that place of true love — love founded in faith and in service. Passion infused every corner of their lives and now echoes through their generations.

You know it in your gut when you get there. Words don’t quite get at it though. Rumi sang about it, Buck waxed poetic from the back of a horse and you’re reading this now.

We all search for that gut-level knowing, the purity and singularity of true love. Jack and Carole knew it. You can’t teach love to lovers, but you can see it in their eyes.

One final quote from “The Essential Rumi”: “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”

This story was originally published January 12, 2017 at 3:06 PM with the headline "Put real passion in your coupling."