Love and Hate are the same thing

Love and hate are the same thing
When I love you, I want to change you
When I hate you, I want to change you
Both to make you love me the way I want.
To make you more like me, so I don’t have to be wrong where I am
To make you more like me, so you can love me the way I’ve always wanted to love myself

Loving you and hating you are the same thing,
Each of you take up the same space-time in my mind,
Recurring thoughts of “I want to change you, shame on me for not loving you as you are”
Actually it’s “I want to change me, shame on me for not loving myself the way I am”
I’m so sorry for punishing you for it.
I shame myself for shaming you for shaming yourself. Torture myself for torturing myself.
How could I love myself while shaming myself for not doing it?
Isn’t the brain funny, how it catches us in these loops?
I don’t want you to not love yourself on this path
Actually it’s I don’t want me to not love myself on this path.
I want you to be kinder and braver with yourself
Actually it’s I want myself to be kinder and braver with myself

When I move away from the pain of kneeling,
It’s the same as when I move towards the second serving when full,
Same feeling inside.
Heart quickens and leaps out in front of me, in a frenzy,
“More of this!” and “Less of that!” it says
Same as more love and less hate. More happiness and less anger.
I finally see through your many costumes!
All of this is the One-Same thing moving me away from the now.

What’s so unbearable about the now?
Don’t think me the answer.
Feel it.

If there was nothing to do, nothing to change, nothing to fix.
I would have to feel powerless. Surrender.
Isn’t that what you came here for? This is too funny.
I keep running from the thing that I want.

You are my kneeling meditation, you are my delicious second serving,
You are the thing I am running towards and away from.
I am the thing I am running towards and away from.

No more running. I want to come home.
I miss You so much.
Take all my wants, my grasping, my need to do,
Even this.
I don’t want anything anymore, nothing.
Take it all so I can finally be here with the You that’s been in Me all along.

*March 2019, Xilai Chan Zen Temple, China.