My Evolving Love

What is love? 

I’ve been asking myself this question in earnest for nearly twenty years. And before that, in a way only the innocence of a child can ponder.

Until I was about twenty, I was predominantly on the receiving end of the spectrum of love. But with that came a poignant understanding of where my idea of love was not, and a feeling of lack and longing persisted.

When I was twenty one, I met Matthew, and began the dynamic journey of partnership and what it means to receive and give love in a perpetual flow. I met the sharper edges of what it feels like to still love, but not always like, the other.

When I became a mother I began to learn the art of giving love with minor reciprocity, as it goes with our young ones. I began to tap an abundance of commitment, patience, and tenderness. But it could be laced with resentment, exhaustion, and anger when my outpouring was continually met with little appreciation in return.

Through traveling each of these deepening experiences, I still thought the feeling of love was supposed to be soft, easy, gentle. I thought feeling love was reliant on a circular flow of giving and receiving. 

If the experience was not that, then it was not loving or being in love. The idea of attaining ‘unconditional love’ mystified me.

And so that concept of love is what I was seeking and emulating in various ways throughout my life. 

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This winter, however, we had an experience that transformed this previous notion of love and I came to know that my narrow conception was only a small facet of its magnitude.

In late December, a domino effect of tragedy, inflamed traumas, and touchy triggers set off an unpredictable moment of absolute disintegration.  A chasm cracked open in our world and threatened to swallow my partner, our marriage, our family, our home, and every other idea I held about our life and what it would be. Our life as I knew it was slipping through my fingers like sand.

I was frozen in panic and at a loss for finding anything I could do to control or stop what was unraveling before me.

Eventually, as the chasm grew wider and closer, complete hopelessness set in and I gave up on attempting to control any aspect of the event. I shattered.

When I broke open, I saw the only way forward was to be with the unraveling. To be with the fear, confusion, uncertainty, destruction and chaos. 

In that moment of letting go, something shifted in me. It was like a veil was lifted and I now had the ability to perceive what was at play behind the human drama. I could feel the nuance and complexity of the pain, and the innocence.

From that place of hopelessness and my shattered grasp, I was filled from my feet to my head with the sensation of an incredible love, beyond anything I had previously known. 

It was warm, luminous, patient. It held no judgment. It understood our moment of crisis as one of breaking free and coming alive - the way I could taste the miracle of life at the moment of our children’s birth. This love was fully present and at ease with the reality of our crisis. There was even beauty in the darkness and the chaos.

Through this experience I came to know many more faces of love. I realized that love does not exist in an exchange between self and other, rather it is self generated by how I choose to meet my experience.  

It becomes available by how open heartedly I meet the moment, how willing I am to touch the raw emotion at hand. 

Love can never be withheld or denied, it is actually the water in which I swim.

In my willingness to be absolutely pierced by the pain of the moment, I found the benevolent embrace of love there to catch me on my knees.

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My experience of this influx of love did not stop our steady slide into the darkness, it did not change a thing around us in the moment. 

It did, however, leave me in its wake with a fearless presence to be with what was happening. 

It changed what was happening between us. It altered the unseen fabric, the unspoken agreements. It quietly transformed how we would be able to move forward. 

With this, the energy and confusion eventually began to de-escalate.

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That moment of meeting a new kind of love shifted my gaze and showed me another way. As the days and weeks passed, our relationship, our family, and our future began to reveal the unmistakable fingerprints of love’s hand.

I could say the chasm won. Our life did slip through my fingers like sand, but it revealed something new in my bare palms. It didn’t look like much at first, it seemed foreign and insignificant. Maybe even devastating. But over time I’ve come to know that it is actually a pearl - a rare beauty born out of and built around the irritation caused by a single grain of sand.

Meeting the aftermath from a heart transformed has shifted everything as we move forward. It has gifted us a safety, transparency, joy and peace that I did not realize were available before. 

I by no means perpetually live from this awareness. But that moment did irrevocably shift my perspective on what’s possible with my human heart, extending the horizon line of what it means to love and how I can connect with that capacity in any given moment. It’s a perspective, a disposition. It’s in my own agency.

When I meet the moment with love, it has the potential to transform the future.

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After sharing this story with a friend, she asked me to distill the essence of my experience into a poem inorder to step out of the details and instead explore the feeling itself. I leave you with what arose at her prompting:

What is Love?

Love is the seed of All That Is,

The substrate of spirit-form-becoming. 

The event horizon and the black hole,

Nothing is beyond its Presence. 

It is the fern unfurling, 

The deer walking,

The cougar hunting,

The nursing babe,

The raised fist. 

Love is the freedom to Be in Any Way. 

The freedom to forget, fumble, terror, rage. 

The freedom to grow, see, journey, heal. 

Dismount the ego from the throne,

Set her at the feet of Love. 

With time and humility the ego will come to see

That Love imbues every aspect of the reality in which we swim. 

Set down expectations, they damn the river of Life, 

Open to acceptance, it grants wings of flight. 

There is nowhere Love does not reside, 

But to see this one must inquire deep inside. 

Tend every part you despise, fear, hide

Behind the illusion Love abides.