WALKING YOUR WALK

Love: Going Along the Garden Path

Love brings me close to you: anxiety takes me far away.
Khalil Gibran, Communion of Spirits

If it's true that people tend to see in themselves what we see in them, then all relationships have staggering possibilities for love. This includes our relationship with ourselves, the primary relationship of this lifetime. I feel the resistance of people when I tell them their primary love affair is with themselves, but if we don't love ourselves, and therefore the god within us, what do we have for others? If we are made in the image and likeness of God, as we are taught in our religions, or we are literally part of the great whole of God, as many others believe, how can we NOT love ourselves? It is the same as choosing not to love God. We begin by looking at ourselves with new eyes and accepting all that we are, loving all that we are. Not so easy for people who have been raised to suspect their own inner process, their own inner mistakes, their own inner self.

Secret Child

She peeks out from behind my breastbone,
shy as a fawn in winter, skin translucent
as Aunt June's porcelain cups, stroked

with patterns of heliotrope. I meant
for her to come forth, but now that she's here
I must learn how to nourish her. Sacrament
has no more meaning than this, a clear
glimpse of a long dormant sleeping self
who used to say I can, I will, until hearing

her caused pain. I sentenced her to dwell
deep beneath the truth, covered over
with denial, until I heard her death knell

and knew I had to name her, or hover
forever between melancholy and blame,
never trusting, never saying I loved her.

When we choose to love, we choose to open to life as the baby opens to the mother. The child doesn't do analysis on whether or not love will be the result, and sadly, it often isn't. But we take the chance day in and day out. Those with great courage choose to present themselves truthfully as they are in this time and space, and await the response. At the very least, we are challenging our own hearts and minds, as we learn to do when we look beyond anger to see fear. So, as Yeats says, we would "...live and die in relationship as many times as we look at things through new eyes." We become new as the people or the self we are relating to become new: always changing, always growing, in one direction or the other.

We must learn to love ourselves and the people in our lives as we love children. How often we forgive, explain and love unconditionally those small beings who are our children, our grandchildren, nieces and nephews or the babies in the park strollers where we jog. They are so perfectly made for loving. What age do they reach where that stops? No age, if you're a loving parent. No matter what torment they put us through as teenagers or adults, we continue to hold that love sacred. And yet our mates, our siblings, our friends are held to a much higher standard to earn our love. They must always respond in the way we expect or we change our perspective, decide they are unlovable when, just yesterday, they were the answer to all our dreams.

I wrote earlier about perspective. Here is where love becomes tricky. Can we look at everyone with the perspective of love and, even when they have done what we see as an unloving act, continue to hold them in love? When I ask this question, people say "I could if I were a saint!" For me, it's in the trying that we thrive, not in the absolute success of the trying. No, we're not saints. But, after a particularly painful incident with a friend, family member or mate, can we go to them and confess our humanity and ask for a new start? Certainly, if we can, that is a loving act. Even if they refuse, we are still in the place of love.

Jesus, however you see him in your spiritual life, was a man when he came to this earth with the complicated mind and heart of a man. When he said "...turn the other cheek," it was not without thought and effort. I'm sure he also talked about how to do that in more detail than we are privileged to know. He threw the money changers out of the temple in a burst of temper that he surely regretted since he preached that we are all one and we all have our jobs to do. So when we do the equivalent of throwing the money changers out, judging those who do other than we would do as unworthy of our love, we are just being human. What we do after that is the important part.

There is no such thing as failure when we are attempting to live a loving life. The attempt is enough. Stop asking yourself for more than you can give. You are not a saint, just a spiritual being inhabiting a human body with all its frailties. And you are a part of God. How can you not be lovable? Stop listening when the scared small voice says you, or someone else, is unworthy. Listen instead to the heart, the slow, strong beating that will continue, until the day you die, to tell you love is health, love is happiness, love is the answer to grief. Love is why we are here.

Soul Practice:Sit in a quiet space and concentrate on a person you love who also causes you to suffer small irritations in your relationship with them. Picture only those qualities that inspire your warmest feelings. Then visualize those qualities growing and growing until they fill up the space where the person was, allowing no room for things you see as negative. Do the same with yourself. When you return to your normal day, see how often you can recall the loving part of that person and yourself and reinforce those feelings. The negative feelings will begin to disappear.

Affirmation: When I wake up in the morning, I will make my first thoght a loving one, whether it be for the weather, my home, the mate sleeping next to me, myself, or simply because I woke up. Soon it will be easy to carry this way of being further and further into my day.

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