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Sometimes on my walks, I would see couples embracing, and while at first it felt like a stab to the heart, I became so moved because I was reminded that even in my hopelessness, love was all around. It did not have to be “mine,” but it was still connected to me.
When our functionality determines our worth, we fail to see ourselves as whole in ourselves, whole with one another. When we do not see ourselves as whole, we expect and wait for miracles to come and complete us. We do not believe that they exist within us, and we forget that our existence is a profound miracle too.
Healing is a perpetual form of change and adaptation, and an act of compassion that we learn to extend toward ourselves. Healing is not clutching at ideas of who we were before we were harmed but remembering that we were always born whole. Healing teaches us that we are forever deserving of love.
The path has been treacherous, and it has also been full of love. Both of those truths merge into a bittersweet combination. When I learned to be in loving relationship with myself, I had to open my heart to the possibilities of falling in love again. I had to fall in love with the world around and within me.
We must remember that it is not love that we are afraid of. We fear the abandonment, betrayal, violence, and abuse that come with the complexities of human trauma and relationships. We cannot fear love because love is embodied. Just as air only becomes breath when it is held within our strong expansive lungs, love only comes into existence through us. If we fear love, then what we truly fear is ourselves. We can never be separated from love.
Maybe love does not wish to be understood but yearns to be felt and remembered.
Love is mysterious, unexplainable, indefinable. As mutable as air, it holds millions of simultaneous truths.
Love is constant and is the force that keeps us alive. Love is as mutable, undefinable, divine, and essential as the great atmospheric beyond. Love is not obtained; love is embodied. Love is freeing, and loving is free.
Love is not just felt sporadically. It is a continuous act that energizes our every move.
Unconditional love is seeing one another, and ourselves, wholly and with compassion. It is where we can be curious and compassionate about all our similarities and differences.
When I say be not afraid of love, I do not mean that we should rid ourselves of fear, but that we should sit with our fear and learn to love it too.
Love is sitting with the vastness of my numbness, the sacred breath of my rage, the prickliness of my knowing, the ceremonies of my grief. Love reveals the truth to us because love is the truth.
To be committed to love is to be committed to the infinite life of change. I know now that I must not fear love, for I am love. We all are.
