Showing Up

I am coming into a new understanding of love. Love for Self, love for Other's, love for the Earth, love for a place... Love is everywhere, love is all things. This is big love, this is Mystery, and it is in all of us.

Lately I feel as though I am a student of love and this includes learning about love as it pertains to partnership and how that may or may not fit into my life. It is imbedded in us from early childhood that we grow up, we fall in love we get married and we have babies we are happy. This sounds nice and I know plenty of people who have beautiful families and this has worked out well for them. We all know other's who are miserable in their relationship and other's still who lose themselves in their partner and others that struggle to find that special someone. We all have our own journeys with love and it is so interesting to me to be a spectator of others 'relationships' as well as my own.

I read an article in Rock & Ice magazine of all places (I've always had a thing for climbers). The article was written by John Long and this was his response when asked about women. I related to what he was saying and  particularly enjoyed the following excerpts:

"My life is paradoxical, full of discord and not-knowing. But there are also moments on the bed in the lamplight, and you want to show up for these because that's where the paradoxes resolve themselves, where for the time it takes a tear to dry, we taste the open-hearted freedom. And it's often just a look, two palms flushed together, all the simplest things."

"She placed both palms flat on my chest - there was a strong medicine in her hands. then she leaned her face over mine. Have you ever tasted a tear? She kissed me and said she could only love for a few hours at a time. But what a few hours. Then she laid her head on my chest and we traveled. That might sound mawkish, but the encounter itself was stripped down, like torch singers in that empty bar, singing a melody so fragile it was barely there. These are the moments that make a life. That much I know for sure."

I may not have a traditional relationship, nor may I ever. What I know today is that I've shown up these moments that John talks about and I am so blessed to have a life full of love.