Thursday, June 9, 2016

That Great Word...LOVE


LOVE – that great word!   I love peanut butter.  I love Moonbeams especially when I can truly feel them.  I love warm wind in my hair, adventures, words, great clothes, fine Limoges China, truth, possibility, my inner trekking…so much more.  I might even love you!

I love my family, treasure my daughter, my stepdaughter, my Grandest one, my son in law….  There are times when that very love feels dangerous, like a tug of war between giving and reluctance or caution.  If my feelings flair, to share my emerging love it takes  courage –  from the French word for heart, Coeur.  Maybe it’ll be judged as mushy or unrequiteable.  Too much.  Inappropriate.  Or it launches an edgy trial balloon barter. Two hugs for one kiss?   Or sometimes love simply retreats in a clash.  Then it needs forgiveness. 

Rejecting love can be a knee jerk response.  To me, it seems that fine impervious membranes surround our feelings in kind of packets.  The love I express can bounce right off the membrane that holds a packet of reactions.   Or off some kind of see-through layer like space metal.  My rolling wave of love clangs!  Then retracts itself. 

My own love learned to hide behind a cold hardness at times.  I was carefully shut down in defense.  I was shocked when I recognized my coldness.   I wanted to melt it down, so I could radiate my love like some of the people whose radiant love I cherish.  For a time I writhed in my coolness standing like a sentinel, observing from my cocoon of gracious sounds.  I have met myself coming!  And now I can work to soothe it. Thank Heaven for life with its myriad of unexpected Bunsen burners like when suddenly you meet your old friend, or a new beloved, heal an old rift, or a brand new baby cooing a delight to see me, or even receive an adult compliment or two or an award for your book!
The song, I want to know what love is, flows through my head at least once a day.  Many decades of life’s stew, lumpy morsels of grief and gain even beyond peanut butter! boil up all kinds of flavours from my legend.  That questing song tears at the membranes round old reactions of all kinds, liberating them to let them warm that chill in my heart.  Love becomes easier and easier. 

As I scan my history, in this life, I am fascinated.   My full spectrum legend fills with people from many environments, in many many emotional settings for friends, lovers, family, saints/gurus.  There are some people who light up many moments on my long path.  Some of those surprise me.   Even through difficulties, fracases or betrayals, somehow the love still emerges as I grow or we both grow.  Our souls know enough to keep turning up the light.  Courageously I can now offer this new love as it grows through me, so we all receive love. 
 
I am writing this piece for a dear sister in law.  Even after I divorced her brother, she has always kept me in the family, treated me warmly and lovingly.  I am so grateful for her faith in me and her steady love.  “Family is family” she said “and we are soul sisters.”  Now and again on the phone we swap rich tales of family, children, marriage, grandchildren, life and death, healing, dreams, and the forgivenesses which come as we grow through our various stages of being.  Spiralling across the ocean, our inner selves churn an elixir of healing, love.   So to Dot, and to several others of you “out there” I say thank you so much for being lights…even LEDs… in my legend.  May we continue to spread the wealth of our love.

Happy Birthday Soul Sister, matriarch of a grand family.  Thank you for keeping me in your loop, and for sharing your love that I might grow mine.

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