Isabel and The Whispers
Highlights from Doc Radio interview with Isabel and The Whispers,
Transcript from April 24th, 2007, continued...
|
Octavio: ...What I found out about love is love you give freely, expecting nothing in return...And
once you have that love, you give because you want to give. You do it, because you do it, and not
because 'if I do this, I get this back...'
Doc: This is St. Ignatius Loyola, right? "To give and not to count the cost, to fight and not to heed
the wound, to toil and not seek for rest; to labor and not to seek any reward, save knowing that you do
Thy Will..."...You know, the problem with that is I need...to be needed...How can you let go of that?
I've tired Zen, man, for two or three years...and they say, 'If you come, you are welcome. If you leave,
you will not be pursued." I wanted to be pursued...don't you know, hallo!...There's no sure way of
getting around it, unless you turn it into, like, being a little tiny stone, just be. And I tried and I realized...I
don't want to to do this...maybe it's too late, I don't know...
Isabel: Well, I don't think there's anything wrong with expecting something. But this song is also
about the ego. You know there's this twist on the phrase, "high horse." Um...and in giving, I think it's
okay to expect, but there needs to be some kind of self-relegation...of the ego, for the giving and the
expecting to keep a healthy balance....I...also feel compelled to say that...God is part of the picture and
God needs to be at the center of whatever it is we want to understand as love. Because God is
love...and my [faith] has become a defining focus of my evolved understanding of what love is. I mean,
Pope John Paul said that love has responsibility as part of its force, it's nature. And they're just not
mutually exclusive, and there's...self-denial involved...that's not hot in our culture today where we just
need instant gratification. I'm not immune to it myself, but those are just some thoughts not directly
suggested by this song, but behind the pain of it...the lamentation that there's so much ego in the
struggles of love...
Octavio: ...It's like anything in life you want to do...you need love for it, passion for it...whether it's
music or painting. The first thing you do is you humble yourself. You humiliate yourself by saying 'I
don't know.' And that's what love is, you humble yourself, you say 'I don't know, I want to be taught, I
want to learn something..."And that's, like, the hardest thing for a human being to do, is to humble
themselves and say, 'Look, I don't know and I wanna learn.' That's why not everybody is a guitar
player, not everybody is an artist, not everybody is a musician... because it requires love. Like Socrates
said, 'Love is the desire of wisdom," you want to know and like Isabel said, 'God is love.' Well...when you
say that God is love that sums up everything that He is...Desire to learn about Him...