Friday, August 10, 2007

faith and gratitude

Love always comes with a price. And, the price is always a broken heart. It doesn't matter if the love lasts a year, a minute, or a lifetime.... it always ends the same way.

Faced with this reality, we can choose to close down and become numb. We can simply not participate.... and in fact, I know people who have done this, and well... they are just a little dead. Many mistake this closing down as "peace" - but, its not. Its just being a little dead.

The other choice is to simply open your heart, knowing that everything is impermanant, and that no matter what, you will suffer. Sometimes unimaginably.

Robert McDonald writes in "Tools of the Spirit" that

Love is 100% participation in life, knowing that who you love will be taken from you, knowing that if you love, your heart will be broken. Love is fully participating knowing that everything you hold dear is changing, is impermanent and will die... it is not a guess, its a guarantee. And the question is, "Whats the value of continuing to love anyway? What is the value of continuing to open again and again and again?" And what is the alternative?



For me, the alternative is to be a little dead. And that is most certainly not what I want. I want to live with an open heart, able to love people in the face of fear, rejection, and certain inevitable loss.

I have been hating myself for loving Ale, and I have been feeling very ashamed of myself for having a broken heart. Elaine said the worst thing she ever could have said to me, when I was crying about it - telling me that "I needed to stop feeling sorry for myself", because it reinforced my sense of shame for having loved.

She may be my mother, and she may be the wisest person I know, usually - but in this case, I have been desperately seeking to find someway that this brokenness was meaningful......

I hope, that somehow, some of my love reached Ale, and that somehow I made him a better man, and his world a better place. I will always love him, because he is who he is, a gentle and loving irreplaceable being. That he didnt love me back in full measure has naught to do with me.... we are all limited in ways and shapes, and he gave me what love he had to give, whatever its limitations.

For me, I will strive to be grateful for having loved and for those moments where he had some love to return.

I will strive to be grateful for this pain, because pain gives us things to work on as we grow more and more human through out our lifetimes. Pain is a messenger, and is not our enemy. It is our friend, if we allow it to be so.

I will listen for this pain, and I will allow it to be meaningful, and I will try and listen carefully for all the lessons it has to teach. I will try and move closer to it, and embrace it, and ask it to help me heal the little shadow child inside of me who holds a core belief that she will never ever be loved.

Love brings joy, but it also brings suffering. Peace can only be achieved with the acceptance that these experiences are neither good, nor bad... they just are, and each has its own gifts.

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