LOVE’S CONUNDRUM

Life's Infinite Gift

I became a devotee to a wise teacher. My guru, and maybe yours, is love. Love provides infinite gifts to live by and learn by, day-to-day, moment-to-moment. 

The more love there is, the more places, and sometimes dark and scary places, that seek love’s embrace. This isn’t an easy path, yet freedom and aliveness stems from this intricate weaving between the “me” and the “we” and can only be received when one surrenders fully to love.

Let’s start at the beginning. I love me. 

Loving me enlivens me, and is free and wildly creative. I feel ecstasy in my radical communion with life itself! Here I am, on an adventure of a lifetime, in the present, as it arises. Love bleeds and sweats from my every word, from every step in the dance of my day. Everything I touch is magic, every moment, an expression of my most sincere and central core. Even in grief and despair, I feel utterly expanded in the joy of life.

Loving myself is easy, especially when I don’t have a lover. I flow through my days with a connection to my heart and it’s simple. So, being that love is my teacher, love adds a complication. 

The radiance that shines from the embodiment of my heart inevitably attracts a Beloved man. This perfect invitation for a divine and delicious dive shows up in my life when I least expect it. It’s undoubtedly sent by spirit. 

Our lives begin to intertwine organically. My lover offers his unobstructed heart, standing tall and solid, desiring all of me, as is. He meets me and sees me, embracing each nuance with respect, with reverence, with love and with total devotion. He is emotionally intelligent, he’s beautiful, and has the soul of a spiritual warrior. He says, “I am here, I love you.” 

My heart simultaneously leaps, swells and melts in response to this man. I say yes to the invitation, but I’m scared. There is a part of me that feels apprehensive about this. I am afraid to lose myself. I am afraid to lose the love I already feel and have. I am afraid to open to the unknown. I had just solidified self-loving ground. 

Yet, the draw to the intimacy, the connection, and to be met and seen is so rich, so promising, and so inviting. So, I seek advice from my teacher (it’s love, remember?). We agree. 

I must let yesterday’s version of love die, to discover what love wants to live through me today. 

This is what I call love’s conundrum. Just when you think you have love figured out, love shows up and asks to be embraced in a new way.

So, in order to preserve the aliveness I so enjoy, I must let go of the grip of yesterday. I must open to what arises with freshness rather than attachment. In the not knowing, in the lack of resolution, in the openness – exist infinite gifts. 

I let go and embrace my lover, not in half contraction, not it fear, not with halfway, but completely, as a conscious choice to meet love, yet again, in this moment, in this form.

I invite my sweetheart in, deep. Our hearts are wide open, soul-gazing, making love in our laughter and tears… our rhythms meet each other at the confluence. Sharing our love is now what is so freeing and wildly creative! I don’t hold back and let the current of the river of “us” to take me in love’s embrace, a love larger than my own, it flows with the power and strength of both our streams merged into one. We make beauty together.

But love has more in store for me. The light of shared love unfurls into my most broken places, painfully revealing where I most need a loving embrace. So like a nurturing mama, I welcome them in, as they are, one-by-one, as they show up.

The hardest of all, so far, is how to come home to myself after merging in the sea of love with my Beloved. It hurts. I want to hold on to the delectable moment and stay adrift together on the gentle and warm waves forever. 

In meeting this too, with love, I remember and return again to letting go of my sometimes white-knuckled grip, and let love define the moment. Aahhh. I don’t have to “do” or “be” anything. Love’s got this. I can surrender my heart. Love is infinite, and the more I can let go and let it live through me, the more I can embrace what is arising in the moment. 

Love is teaching me to love me, while I love another; and to love another, while I love me. I’m dancing the sacred rhythms, each day, allowing love to dictate the script. 

Thank you Guru, thank you Love.