loving myself, loving another, living in a state of love

It has been an emotionally intense summer, and a very beautiful one. Now after the water and trees and play of Maine in august, i returned to Albquerque last week. Into my life...
   love has been my quest for sometime, maybe even for most of my adult life. it has come in three different areas at least. One is expressing love through sound and music and singing. I have been moved by singers and music throughout my life, and been learning to express my feelings through song. I studied Italian singing when i was younger, and although my goal was to do original music, and that is where i am today, i fell in love with the Italian love songs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centures. Such pathos, such passion, expressed so incredibly and beautifully! Very raw emotion, and no doubting, no self consciouness about it, they just let it rip. Romantic love in very pure form. I took my singing into songs i wrote, but my songs were for many years more an expression of my other search for love, the more Cosmic love, the search for Self and NoSelf. I lived in a zen center in Jemez Springs for a couple of years, and i was still studying Italian singing. So i would take my guitar across the jemez river and go into a canyon to practice my scales and songs so i wouldn't disturb anyone. (That by the way is a recurring theme, that practicing and writing songs and singing disrupt the people with whom i live...) And sat zazen, searching for the mystical enlightenment, the dissolving of ego into zero for which we all long (am i assuming too much!?)
    Anyway, the songs i wrote after i left the center were more about my spiritual quest. I honestly don't think, although i was in and out of several relationships, that i had any clue as to what love was, to love a woman and partner. I didn't write many real love songs at the time, nor do i think i was capable of singing a love song well. In my classical studies, i excelled at the heroic songs of Schumann, and the technically challenging, florid songs of Handel. And my own songs were about saving the world, sometimes serious, sometimes humorous, and only occasionally personal. And even when i did write a love song, from my perspective now i didn't feel it very deeply.
    Now i see these two threads coming together, and my quest for love is all one quest. The quest to know myself, and rest in the unconditional deep love that exists prior to all thought, in this moment, is not separate from my desire to know the love of man and woman. And all of it brings me to my Self, and resting in who i am, without searching for anything or anyone. To be able to love my self finally after all these years, to love my pain, my heartaches, my joys, my triumphs and my failures, mostly to be fully accepting of whatever arises in me moment to moment, this is the intersection of it all. Thoughts and feelings come and they go, people and circumstances  come and go. The trick here (seems to me)is to love it all passionately, while also knowing it is ephemeral, that nothing lasts. As a youth, i couldn't quite deal with the intensity of loving and losing, so i think i gave myself less than fully, i didn't love with whole hearted passion, but  pretended not to care, by being "spiritual". At the same time, my body and my heart, (everything but my mind, i suppose)thirsted for a passionate life, to touch and be touched, to be wild and crazy and loving each beautiful moment as it passed. I was beyond and above all this roiling crazy beauty that is life. I was slightly dead, sleepwalking through life, knowing (imagining i knew!)in my youthful arrogance, that all is emptiness, and love brings pain, attraction and desire lead to loss. Occasionally i awakened from this trance, and i was continually desiring women and sex, but never diving in fully, never experiencing my lover and my desire for her with All of my Being!
    So now i am working on a project of Love songs from Around the World. I also intend to do a final recording of my spiritual quest songs, that i wrote while i was in bands for the last twenty years. And i am writing new material, and singing spiritual chants. But it is all different expressions of the One Love. Love songs can be deeply spiritual, and chants can be passionate expressions of love. Forms change, the silence which gives song birth, is always present.
     in gratitude to women and boa constrictors, gurus and guitars...