As a shaman, when I'm bewildered or overwhelmed, as I was this morning after being drenched in vivid dreams last night, I have to get out of the hermetically sealed cube I call home, out into the world. I have to look at the sky, listen to the birds, watch for augers. I believe that what people call the "natural world"** contains everything I need to help process and (maybe) eventually understand whatever it is that I'm confused about. There are clues everywhere, believe me. All I have to do is pay attention.
Sure enough, the frilly angel wing clouds, the robins singing their tiny asses off (they are so LOUD), the green/gold light of early summer in the early morning, and the slightest, sweetest breeze, neither hot nor cold, helped me gather my wits about me. Thank god for this beautiful city. Wow.
Love is a monumental power, a force of nature, I think. The image of Cupid and his arrow is so apt, for me at least. It describes the unpredictable nature in which love flows through the heart.
Right now I am feeling love for someone I don't even know, a friend of a good friend, who has just endured surgery for cancer. I've been sending this friend of a friend a steady stream of Reiki, and holding her in my mind and heart, "seeing" her well and whole and happy. I'm doing this more for my good friend because she is in such distress over her friend's condition, she doesn't have the wherewithall to keep the faith. Keeping the faith for this person I've never met has opened my heart in a profound way. I am blown away by the experience.
The above is not the only kind of love flowing through my heart at the moment. It's kind of a lot to deal with! Hence the walk this morning, with angels passing by overhead and rivers of clouds under foot.
A friend is absolutely correct when he says love is scary. I've been teasing him about this but I'm going to stop straightaway. It is scary because it is so powerful, and so beyond our control. As usual, all I can say is: wow.
**What part of the world is unnatural, eh? We build houses, but so do bees, beavers, groundhogs, wasps and many other animals. We don't call their houses unnatural, but we think of what we build as ... what? ... otherworldly??
14 comments:
Wow, I may be the first comment.
Maturity brings calmness and a contentment with life if we are lucky. I loved the passions of youth, but I sure wouldn't go back.
Me neither! And I do feel lucky. Oh yeah.
Oh that Merle!
'Wow!' that was what I was going to say.
It is very powerful. I think that is why I feel a little safer standing at the side of the stream dangling my feet in rather than plunging into the middle. It seems like it would take a lot of effort to keep from getting swept away in the current.
The cool thing about you Reya, is you find these amazing insights everyday and you pay attention.
Peace.
Oh the passion of youth. So intense it carries you away. So glad I experienced it. Love is scary. All that hard passion is behind me but the depth of love is still there. Scary when I look at my companion and contemplate the possibility of being left behind.
Though I no longer feel like love requires sex, moving in together, then arguing over who does the laundry, it still moves through me with great force.
I used to think it was all about the hormones, but it isn't! At least for me.
I agree that love is scary - it's like high school - will they hurt my feelings? Will I be unrequited? But sometimes it's just ok - drink it in, give it out, live a little bit on the edge.
Oh, honey. You're speaking directly to my heart today... so many kinds of love, some of them easier for me to put into motion than others... Why is romantic love so dang complicated?
Thank you for this post!
Hold faith, a thought form of another's health and wellness, is a large part of our work, I've found. Sometimes we just have to hold it for them until they are strong enough to take the job back for themselves. The old forest for the trees thingy.
My guru, Sai Maa, teaches us that there are only two states of energy. Love and Fear. If we are not in one, we are in the other. She challenges: which do you choose?
My mother was a big proponent of the polarity of love and fear. I'm a complexitarian. I think everything is more than this or that.
Cool challenge, though!
Kathy do you think romantic love is more complicated than familial love?
My goodness, it's hilarious that you just called me "Kathy" while asking that question--that's my sister's name! Family love is definitely complicated... but I don't know whether more or less than romantic love. Maybe just differently complicated. Romantic love has that sexual attraction component, which makes everything confusing...
My favorite saying about family is that they don't just push your buttons, they INSTALL them. :)
Sorry Karen. What a typo!
love. well it's there in everything. all the time. without condition. let it flow through you like music and there's no knowing where everything goes. because suddenly you tap into something much more essential. i'm really excited by your last sentence about housing. really excited. there's one step that differentiates human housing and that's attunement to what's right and what's necessary. much of what we create bypasses those two states. peaceful evening. steven
Steven many people would say the same thing for beaver dams. A few years ago, the beavers got going in the Tidal Basin. They were killing all the cherries and wreaking havoc in the basin. Was that necessary? We all wondered.
Same goes for wasp nests. I think our opposable thumbs get us into a lot of trouble.
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