LOVE: VULNERABILITY

This business of being human is not easy. Life is messy and unpredictable and frequently amazing, and sometimes devastatingly painful. It's an adventure, an exhilarating ride, a lesson in uncertainty, an invitation to open and expand and practice being present which naturally leads to gratitude. But it's not something you can organize or control. As much as is possible, try to open to each day with the wisdom of yesterday minus any hardness. Allow yourself to be curious and surprised. Sometimes, yes, you will be disappointed, heartbroken, even. But don't doubt that life might bring you some incredible gifts as well. Try not to close yourself off to that possibility. Because without hope, the world becomes a very dark place. Sometimes the filter needs a serious wipe-down, and other times it really needs to be shattered. If you've got a tinted window over your heart, I'd vote for a shattering.


Over the past week I've felt more vulnerable than I ever have before. I feel cracked open, and I'm not sure I'll ever really close up again, not that I was very closed before.You cannot live in fear, that's a sickness. It's a soul-sickness. Because the heart can't open and the love can't flow if you are in the grip of despair. Of trying to control or manage or predict or manipulate. The things you hold most dear can be ripped away from you, senselessly, violently, without warning. Or slowly, painfully, with warning and with the heart-wrenching reality that you cannot stop it no matter what you do, or how you hope or pray. Anyway, I was in love in the way you can be only when you look into the eyes of your child. But I felt the tremendous vulnerability of the thing weighing on me. And I couldn't, nor did I want to, push it away. For awhile, I struggled with how to open to the reality of a love like this, and the understanding that nothing is promised. And I realized the doorway to living and breathing and rejoicing and receiving was gratitude. However long I have to open to love, let me celebrate it. Let me say thank you and thank you and thank you a million times, every moment of every day. You let the reality of the thing harden you and close you, or you allow it to soften you and open you and inspire you to not miss any opportunity to love.

I know from my own personal experience, making your inner world a loving place to be is doable. It's not easy, it takes work and a willingness to sit with your pain and find the path toward healing that will work for you. If we aren't loving ourselves, we're rejecting ourselves. That's a violent act. And pain inside leads to pain outside, just like love inside leads to love outside. We don't need everyone,