A New Way to Love

"The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky,

Are also on the faces of people going by.

I see friends shaking hands, sayin', "How do you do?"

They're really saying, " I love you" 

~from Lyrics "What a Wonderful World" by Louis Armstrong

I am IN love. 

Not like "what is his name?" kind of love. 

Not like "every Cary Grant movie ever made" kind of love. 

And not like "co-dependent attachment you can't do without it" kind of love.

What I mean is I am always "IN love" because I am always surrounded by (in) Source (love) all of the time.

Feels great to use these words - "IN love" about myself when I know it is not some bullshit positive thinking word game but my honest and real Truth.

Feels great to use these words - "IN love"  about myself when I know that this love cannot and will never be taken away from me.

Feels great to use these words - "IN love" about myself in such a new and different way than ever before -  so fully, passionately and completely.

Within this Love I am safely held. And it just feels great!

Can you dig it? Too quote Billy Crystal as Louis Armstrong, "I knew that you could. Oh Yaaaah…"

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Requesting Relief

Loving someone is neither 'a trap' nor 'the answer.' It is a connection to Love. This truth allows for expansion of giving & receiving. Knowing this truth is a gift of great freedom and joy!

Struggling to stay content with all the great and wonderful aspects of the life I am living I am arrived at a crossroads. I am needing relief from paralyzing desire.

This desire is for a person, but it could just as easily be for anything that is unattainable or beyond your control. 

Desire is a sticky place. It will not let me go. I am caught up in a thicket of confusing old thoughts, feelings and experiences. They bind me tightly to the past and do not let me move on. 

I find this condition showing up again and again. And I chaff at how easily it quickens and absorbs all of my attention. The momentary elation I feel when I willingly climb back into this space is scarred by the truth of the thing.

It is from within this space of inner controversy - because I cannot have what I want - that I request some relief.

And I am, as usual, given what I ask for as I have asked from a place of acceptance and love.

Loving someone is neither 'a trap' nor 'the answer.' It is a connection to Love. This truth allows for expansion of giving & receiving. Knowing this truth is a gift of great freedom and joy!

non-judgmental awareness

"The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it." ~thich nhat hahn

Ahhhhhh - to be in non-judgmental awareness is a lovely vacation of sorts. It is a getaway from the push and pull of things. When I am here all that crosses my "virtual desk of life" is not labeled or catogorized or responded to...only experienced as exactly what it is in it's wholeness. In that moment I am the witness.

Not an easy task I realize, but a fun game to play. The apparatus I find most useful in getting there is an open heart. With my heart wide open things expand in their meaning and I find insights in the most common of things.  When I can be in this space life gets larger and is more path-worthy. It is in non-judgmental awareness I find myself more strongly attuned to those subtler senses of intuition & perception.

This all reminds me of the beginning credits in old movies. This movie was filmed in CinemaScope. Not really sure what Cinemascope means, but for me it feels like the picture will be bigger and better than I had ever experienced in the past. 

This life was "lived in Non-JudgmentalAwareness." 

That can only be good - right?

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Joyful Creativity

       Maui - Polynesian Trickster God

Excerpts from IT'S BETTER TO BE A TRICKSTER THAN A MARTYR by Elizabeth Gilbert

"There is another way to be creative that does not make a fetish out of suffering. There is an older way, a richer way, a more generative way — the way human beings had been making art for about 30,000 years, before Europeans started taking things all too seriously. This is the path of playful collaboration with the mysteries of inspiration. This is the path that says you are neither the slave to your muse, nor its master — but that you are its partner, and that the two of you (artistic mystery and you) can delight in each other. This is the path that says creativity is a weird but never-boring dance, and that you are allowed to actually enjoy it regardless of how it turns out. This is the path that focuses more on the wonderful strangeness of the process and less on the result. This is the path that does not worship suffering and torment, and does not respect the reality police who say that life is nothing but a grim march of pain. 

This is the path of the trickster, not the martyr. The trickster (represented forever in world mythology as the fox, the crow, the coyote, the monkey) sees through our delusions of seriousness and exposes the play underneath all our drama. The trickster says, 'You are welcome to die for your cause if you really want to, but I'm not here to spend my life suffering.'

The trickster understands that all this world is temporary, all of it is shifting, all of it is nonsense, all of it is fair game for delight. The trickster never dies a grim death in a walk-up tenement while suffering romantically from tuberculous. The trickster doesn't compete, doesn't compare, doesn't beat his head against the wall, doesn't wrestle demons, doesn't try to dominate mysteries that were never meant to be dominated in the first place. The trickster just keeps on PLAYING. The trickster is slippery and sly, wry and wise, always looking for the secret door, the hidden stairway, the funhouse mirror, the sideways way of looking at things — and the trickster always endures." 

Yes, yes, yes! Will you come PLAY with me?

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Heartbreak

"Never allow someone to be your priority while allowing yourself to be their option." ~Mark Twain

It is real - the root of the thing. 

But is made distant by

the everything else.

I am creative and powerful

Yet I cannot shun the weight of it

It is cornered - me and it together

Win some, lose some

Be careful what you wish for

It cannot be you 

It can never be you

It can only be the Truth

Not enough chocolate in the world...

What is Reasonable?

"Unknowing, if one can be open and vulnerable, will take us down to the very deeps of knowing, not informing the mind but coursing through the whole body, artery and vein–provided one can thrust aside what the world calls common sense, that popular lumpen wisdom that prevents the emerging of the numinous." ~ Pamela Travers

I am living in spite of myself. I am doing things I would never do, yet I do them, in spite of all I have come to know about who I am. Is this reasonable? 

Often lately I find myself appreciating, then allowing, then being with an unfolding me - in spite of the me I have always known myself to be. Is that reasonable?

Am I not sure of who I am and what I prefer? How can I operate in the uncertainty of what is or is not to come? There seems to be no grounding here, no relative center in this way of being. It feels quite like the floor of a fun house - shaky, slippery, and curved. Oh... I am getting nauseated just thinking about it! 

It is here at the dark edge of the mystery I find myself. And all I can do is live it - trusting if I follow the light it will take me out to the other side; trusting that Love will not only be waiting for me there - but that Love will have been moving along with me, in me and all around me all the time.

Knowing this is what gives me the sound footing I require. Knowing this informs my emerging self that it is OK to feel awestruck, terrified and touched by grace all at the same time.

Is this sound? Is this reasonable?

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Attachment

"By extending our ordinary feelings of love and concern beyond their usual biased limits, love is freed from the restrictions of attachment." ~ HHDL

Finding attachment to be the source of many of my tears, I am intrigued by this quote. Grieving loss or Fear of losing something to which I am attached appears suddenly childlike today. I am thinking of a pacifier, a blanket... or a husband perhaps?

As an adult you would think we would give up these attachments because we see children go thru so much suffering when they want something very badly. Or when they have the thing they love and it falls from their mouths or arms or is otherwise misplaced.

And we work very hard to break them of these attachments because they are "growing up" and should learn to let go of such things. 

The first day of school can be a challenge for some children (and parents) very attached to eachother. But we do the HARD work necessary to train detachment so our children can become independently functioning beings. Is this what is meant above by "love is freed from restrictions of attachment"?

What are these "biased limits"? I wonder if they are those external things that we think we NEED to make us happy, feel secure and otherwise soothe us. Who is there to help us adults do the hard work of letting go here? 

Perhaps I can use meditation to extend my ordinary feelings of love and concern beyond their biased limits to become more open-hearted and a little freer from suffering!

Yes - this is more hard work. But it has all been hard these last 18 months since Michael died. Why should this be any different? 

I do admit though - I sure could use a vacation from the work of being me. The work of managing my sorrow and cultivating my future by actively staying awake in the present. That must be why I imagine loving again - in this new way - a detached way. 

Can Loving get easier?

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