When I Am Easy About Love

When I am easy about love I am easy about life and death:
It makes no difference to me then if the sun does not shine:
I am not worried because affairs go wrong when love goes right:
I reach out and somehow everything falls into the palm of my hand—
All beauty and goodness fall there, all dreaming and hoping fall there:
Though I own no lands and am without fame yet I am as rich as love:
The old jealousies slip away, the grudges and animosities slink out of sight:
Now all life gathers round me—all the people and all the stars gather:
For being easy about love and being easy about life is like being finally free:
For then I go to everything and everything comes to me and the dissenting spheres are blended.

What is it all about—this yes and no of dust and the soul?
I do not know—I do not need to know: I am satisfied just to keep on my way:
I too ask questions and ask again but I do not have to be answered:
The sun shines, my family the crowd work and aspire, and I love:
To me that is enough and more than enough: there is nothing beyond that:
To be loved is not enough: it is something but it is not enough:
But to love—that is enough: that is the substance at the center from which everything emerges:
And that is why when I am easy about love I am easy about you and anyone else:
And that is why when I am easy about love I am easy about the wrongs and sorrows of men:
For being easy about love is to know that love will after all confusions in the end prevail:
For being easy about love is to see past the imperfections to perfection, past blindness to vision:
For being easy about love is being easy about the burdens I must bear over bad roads to my waiting children.

When I am easy about love I am easy about life and death:
And then I am easy about my body and my bodily desires and consummations:
And then I am easy about my spirit and its forthreaching discoveries:
And then I can pierce farther into things different and see them way off come together:
And so I am easy about the evils that without love would break my heart:
About my comrade whose dear daughter just died and was buried and about my dear son who left me long ago:
About all the mothers who wring their despoiled hands and the fathers who stand by their sides and are silent:
About the wars and the earthquakes and the greeds which men endure and with which they contend:
I am easy about it all because I am easy about love: I can give you no other reason for it:
I am easy about love because love is easy about life and life is easy about death:
I visit you with ceaseless consolations: in days and nights of surrender I am with you and in you:
You, my brothers, who are not so easy about love—who have yet to learn the lesson:
You, you, you: oh! because I am easy about love I am easy about you!

If I was not easy about love I would be easy about nothing,
And I think I would give up just where I am or where I was when I started,
And I am afraid I could not battle against the cruelties of the world with more than half a heart,
And it is very likely that I would no longer be of use to you, my dear companions, for my cheer would be gone,
For being easy about love means being easy about everything:
For being easy about love means taking the worst and always making the best out of it,
For being easy about love means being so full of life as to leave no room for death:
So that being easy about love is necessary for you and for me if we are to live:
And being easy about love is necessary for states and religions and peoples if they are to live:
There is no doubt about it: it comes to me more and more: it more and more steadies and enlarges me:
Being easy about love—in no matter what place or time of hate, being easy about love:
No matter what may seem to make it impossible, being easy about love:
When I am easy about love I am easy about life and death.