In my search for the truth, I have come to conclusion that the ultimate purpose of life is to love. It is not to be loved or desire Love, it is to love everything, to develop compassion for all. To become Love.

The reason our purpose is to become love is because Love is the deepest expression of goodness, of respect, of tenderness towards the beings that exist. It is our most compatible vibration. It is the truth of the universe.

And it is all connected, interacting, dancing the great dance of life!

If we did not have bees, we would not have flowers or fruit. If we did not have rain, we could not grow food to eat.

If we did not have night, the Earth would never sleep. If we did not have stars and galaxies spinning spinning, we would have nothing at all.

It is a system of perfect balance, of coexisting beings and forms that all make up the whole. And the spirit which directs it all, the spirit which blooms as a rose, buzzes as a bee, howls as a wolf, dreams in the nighttime and spins endlessly as stars and suns and planets, that spirit which lives and dies in a Human body, which feels and thinks and learns, who falls in Love, who’s heart breaks, who dances and dreams, that spirit in each of us, some call it nature, others call it God.

Although we are all one gigantic flowing organism with one underlying spirit, we are also this energy split into an endless variety of forms.

A tree is not a flower, a fish is not monkey, a mountain is not a star. And like the snowflakes, each entirely unique in its shape, we forms are each unique, each with our own unique personality and essence.

So we are one and we are many. Infinite many. And so to exist together, to make it all work between this countless number of forms, we have Love.

We have the Earth as our home, the animals as our friends, the ocean our playground, we have cities and wide open spaces, we have created societies, currencies, language, technology, philosophy.

We are born, we live and we die.

This can all be a joyous celebration or it can be a heavy burden. From our limited perspective we might wonder what is the point of it all.

We might forget that it is all a great dance, that grass was meant for bare feet, oceans for swimming, music for playing, life for loving.

If we can begin to look at life on a grander scale, we would see that you are me and I am you. And that this new expanded viewpoint extends to all forms, from a grain of sand to a supernova.

The underlying spirit is the same. We have just been sectioned off into ant and zebra and grass and sky.

This sectioning off simply allows spirit, nature, God to experience itself, to move, to taste, to feel, to exist, to wonder and dance and celebrate infinity.

So we are here to learn Love. Even to love death, for it is death that allows the universe to create ever more new shapes, new beings. And nothing really dies, it just appears that way in our bodies.

We are here to remember what we already know, that the spirit of nature is Love. And this Love is eternal, timeless.

We are here to cultivate compassion for all our brother and sister forms, to live wild and free, to die laughing, to celebrate the luck of existence as we dance the great dance of Love.

Leonard Cohen dedicated his song ‘Dance Me to the End of Love‘ to the victims of the Holocaust that inspired him to write the song. In an interview, he said of the song:

It is curious how songs begin because the origin of every song has a kind of grain or seed that somebody or the World hands you and that is why the process is so mysterious about writing a song.

This song came from just hearing or reading or knowing that in certain death camps during the second world war, beside the crematoria, a string quartet of classical music was pressed into performance while the horror of prisoners being killed and burnt, was going on.

So, when writing ‘Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin’ I was referring to the consummation of life, the end of existence.

But it is the same language we use for surrender to the beloved, so that the song be able to embrace all.

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Oh, let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
We’re both of us beneath our love, we’re both of us above
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love