Love
I can't think of anything more worth starting with. For the reason I write comes from this place. The reason I MUST write. To find, to heal, to speak, to soothe this part of me, my HEART, that has been shut down for far too long.
I spent the last year uncovering her. Assuring her she could come out of the dark to play, to look around, to practice feeling and seeing in all the ways she couldn't when she was young. She was hesitant. I wooed her with poetry, I courted her in my dreams (and she me), and I asked why I had spent most of my life not understanding love.
And she answered,
"Perhaps it was the day you married too much with your head and ignored your hearts longings, Perhaps it was the years before where the loves you really LOVED were the ones you pretended not to. Perhaps, it was the way you would hurt and feel so much but your father would say, 'You're too sensitive!' and send you to do something to get over it. Perhaps all those years of sitting dreamily beneath trees, gazing out the window at the mountains as the car barreled down those park roads, noticing all those small movements and nuance of feeling that no one else did...but had no idea what to do with this gift...Perhaps there you lost your way to love".
But its deeper than that, I thought. It's a wounding I can feel that aches and hurts always. A longing I can't temper. Even when I am fully surrounded by friends, children, lovers...the pull is still there of 'not quite enough'. Like the baby that fusses in your bed beside you because its calling for you to tend it, to pay attention, to get to the bottom of what the real need is so it can lie comfortable and at peace again.
It is the deep Sacred Wound. And for me, I was lost to love before I can remember. Before I lay in the light beside my mothers breast. When I drifted in and out of sleep in the waters of my mothers belly, and this longing furrowed a lifetime of searching for deep connection and trying to plant roots in things i see that might grow me to healed.
A story i was recently told by my father about the day i was born goes like this. My mama had me around 6 pm. I was held in her arms, driven home, and by nightfall she was disconnected from me, passed out from drinking her 'numbing medicine' while my dad lay me on his chest and fed me from a bottle. When this story was told my heart broke open wide and also offered me the greatest gift of seeing why all this searching has never come to a quiet end. Why it never will because deep connection is the gift rooted in the tilth of this hole in my heart.
This story is not just mine. We all have this story in one way or another and in sharing it I hope you'll be able to tell your story truthfully to yourself. To know where you came from. To know why you ache. To understand why you don't want to let love in. It is the first step in truly understanding love.
And I share my stories here so you also know that your birth is not your destiny. And, that the very wounds you were given in this life are indeed your greatest offerings, your greatest gifts if you can shine them up, dust them off, tend and feed them and return yourself to peace.
I started by LOVING it all and ALLOWING it all. In myself, and in others. The hardest part was to do that for myself. It still is. But, Im learning what love really is by moving toward love right alongside the fear of it taking me under, with the fear of it breaking me harder than ever. I move toward love because 'fear has no place in a heart that loves'.
...........And, I chose love.
