LOVE MONTH: DAY 12: “Trust your heart if the seas catch fire, live by love though the stars walk backward.”― E.E. Cummings
Isn’t that lovely? Mr. cummings had a way with words, for sure.
There are times for all of us when we are too sad to contemplate the love we may have felt for someone who leaves or whom we have to leave, or they die, or other things come to separate us, and we want to harden our hearts against that pain of loss.
That is not possible, for what is happening, if we allow it, is that our hearts will break in ways that open us to the loss and our grief. When we do this, we are given a larger capacity, every time, for joy and love to rule more fiercely in our lives.
I can love more today than I could yesterday because I have sat, to the best of my abilities, with my loss and grief and betrayal and all the letting go for the first 65 years of my life.
Many of the stories I have told myself about these things have shifted. The betrayals of lies or harm done against me have become things that others did, not things that were done to me or against me.
This includes my family, the US government (especially the US Air Force and its members!), biker gangs I hung out with, individual men and women, people I had carried in my heart and closed it around for many years.
The problem with doing that is that I could not open my heart to others who came along, because of the anger and resentment I held inside my heart. It was closed around these stories and these events to the extent that I was dying for light and love to come in. Oh!
I thought it was someone else’s job to break through that crap. Then I got to this recovery place and learned that all of it was BS I made up, believing that YOU and YOU and YOU were the problem. I had to hide away from all of it. Truth is, I needed to reframe this shit and get the hell over it! And so that process began with Step 1 through 12, but mostly through 4 through 9. THEN I could apply steps to all of it until it began to soften.
My heart broke open and love flowed in. For me, for you, for Universal Power, for all of life! I would love to say here that it has been like that, a gigantic Hippie Love Fest, ever since, but it has come in awkward bits and pieces and jumps and starts and falling downs and getting ups and trying again and again to learn to let you be who you are and doing what you are doing without the self-centered focus on how it feels TO ME. Because that focus was always the problem. It was ALL ABOUT ME again and again.
Today I love me and my broken old heart. We are walking through the world a lot more open and with a lot less judgment and expectation. And, by the way, a lot less pain and resentment. Funny, huh? It was all about ME, but not the way I thought…happens every damned time!
Dolphin Hug 