Category: Love

It’s funny how the universe drops little jewels of joy and uplifting in the path of your life now and then, treasures unawares, if I might modify that phrase a bit.

I had several jewels dropped into my path today ~  sown last night, when we lent our car to one of my daughters, after she’d come out of work to find one of the tires on her car flat. Out of that less than positive happenstance, as with jewels taken from the dirt and stone in which they’re formed, came these three treasures ~

1.) I got to spend half an hour talking with Brigette about things that are important to us, as well as just chatting, when she picked me up on her way back to work so I could get my car;

2.) talking with her about the seminar I’m going to in Ontario this weekend and enumerating the ways that I know I’m meant to go to this seminar, helped to calm my heart and worries that the check I’m waiting for won’t come in time for us to go, and

3.) but, this, the most complex and multifaceted of the treasures I received takes longer to explain.

Brigette had left the radio on what I think was a christian station she listens to. The news program was interesting, but when I went to push the button to find out what station it was, I accidentally hit one of the programmed buttons instead, so I had to search through to find the station again ~ I’m not sure if I found the right one, because the newscast had just been ending when I hit the wrong button, and when I got back to a christian station, the second or third one the scanner stopped at, there was a young woman speaking about how she’d reached out to Jesus when she was 9 and felt him take her hand as she sat on the back of a horse. Of course the word “horse” caught my attention, and even though I’m not religious, I am a person of faith, and what little I’d heard touched my heart, so I continued to listen.

The young woman’s parents had died (I don’t know how) when she was only 9, and her life seemed to have crashed down around her and, just as my heart called out to my angels several months ago, in her grief and pain she had cried out the only name she knew, even though she’d only ever been to church once or twice in her life ~ Jesus. She said that in that moment she had felt him take her hand and he had never left her since.

As I drove to the store before I went home, I continued to listen, and it turned out that the young woman and her husband were guests on the radio show, which I later discovered was Focus on the Family. The couple’s names are Kim and Troy Meeder (I looked them up on the Focus On the Family website), and they are the founders, owners, operators of Crystal Peaks Youth Ranch, in Bend, Oregon ~ where they have helped thousands of “broken” children find healing by working with the horses the Meeders have also rescued and helped to heal.

Listening to them talk about how they built Crystal Peaks from a plot of land that had been scraped raw and mined for cinders to spread on the roads, 8 acres of land that had no grass or trees or even dirt when they started (which was how they could afford it in the first place), I was struck by how obvious it was that, in healing that piece of land, they were learning patience, growing in faith and belief, and preparing themselves for the next great work of rescuing “broken” children and horses who, within that same love and belief, though they were unaware of it,  would help to heal each other.

It was a beautiful story, and one that speaks to me of the best uses of one’s faith. As I listened, there were points at which I felt the flush-and-goosebumps feeling that I associate with being in contact with the divine, whether you call it the cosmos, or the universe, or god, or the holy spirit ~ it is an in-flooding and an up-welling of love and belief that refreshes and re-energizes, as true love and belief always do.

It was a gift to me, carried on the joy in the voices of these two people as they talked about the children and horses they had brought together and helped to find healing.

It was one of the jewels dropped in my path today, and I wanted to share it, knowing that even in giving it to you, the gift stays with me still. For, as some of the oldest texts of faith, the Upanishads, tell us, the abundance of the universe cannot be reduced, no matter how much of it is taken or given away.

“From abundance he took (received) abundance ~ and still abundance remained.”

May you live and love in the abundance of divine energy that vibrates through and around us all.

For Christmas this year, I’m giving myself permission to stay home, just my love and me, and do absolutely nothing, maybe watching movies, or reading, or listening to music, or just lying in each others arms and talking. It’s been (in the words of the Counting Crows) a long December, one that seems to have lasted all year, for me, and more difficult days ahead.

But tomorrow is the winter solstice, which marks the turning of the year and the returning of the light as the days now begin to lengthen toward spring. Friday night is Christmas Eve, marking the eternal return of another kind of Light to the world. Sunday is a personal celebration day for me, as it marks the birth of my son. For others, many of these days between now and the New Year mean observances of other celebrations, each with their own symbols of life and hope, of prayers for peace and gifts of love. So many paths,  all leading to the same summit, and the same sun shining in many windows.

So I’ve chosen to give myself a little break, a season of rest in the spaces between, to take comfort from the light rather than dwell upon the shadows behind and in the path ahead, to remember and give thanks that I’m blessed to have so many people that I love who love me right back ~ and to rest in the upwelling joy that ordinary people in an ordinary place can create when they choose to do so ~ like this gift of joy given me by one of my daughters.

Wishing, for all of you, an upwelling of quiet joy and all the love and peace this season brings ~

I’ve had reason, lately, to be thinking much about love and how necessary to life it is, as necessary as food to eat, air to breathe. Like the unbroken thread of the Celtic triquetra knot, all love, but especially that between two people who have made a commitment to each other, is made up of not only love, but also trust, and respect. Each lobe holds within itself so many aspects and expressions: caring, compassion, concern, empathy, and ~ for lovers, especially ~ a kind of selflessness that cares more for the other’s well-being than for one’s own.

Love that not only desires and takes pleasure in, but also holds and cares for the lover when he or she is sick, and soothes and heals when he or she is sick at heart. Trust in each other so sure that, when one is confused, afraid, or doesn’t know what to do, seeking out the other, in the sure and certain knowledge of his or her complete attention and concern, is always the first action or reaction. Respect that causes each to hold him or herself to a level of honesty, fidelity, and devotion to the other that is absolute and impenetrable. Take away any one of those lobes and neither of the others can stand ~ sooner or later, the whole will collapse.

St. Paul explains it thus:

⁴ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵ It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶ Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

⁸ Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. ⁹ For we know in part and we prophesy in part, ¹⁰ but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. ¹¹ When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. ¹² For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

¹³ And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Like the thread of the triquetra, love is the one unbroken golden thread that runs through our lives, connecting us all, each to the other ~ lover to lover, parent to child, grandparents, siblings, cousins, friends ~ all are bound by that golden thread. Unhappily, it is not always smooth and bright, is indeed often tarnished and tangled in knots so complex and pulled tight they can never be undone, can never be made straight again, but must just be left as they are, the true end of the thread, beyond the tangled knot, found again and followed. Sometimes that true end is the same for both, but sadly, sometimes it is not.

“Love is not love /Which alters when it alteration finds, /Or bends with the remover to remove: /O no! it is an ever-fixed mark/That looks on tempests and is never shaken.”

Like a New England rock wall that has stood for hundreds of years, or those stone jetties that jut out into the sea of the north Atlantic coast, true love endures. Storms may rage, winds may blow, snow and ice may cover, but all those things are as ephemeral as autumn leaves, while the stones beneath, each supporting and being supported by the others, remain.

With such sorrow, I’m seeing again, among people I love, the death of what was meant to be a life-long commitment ~ because they never had that rock wall to support them. Only one of the two truly loved as both the Bible and the Bard have defined it. The other, over a long period of time and despite the patience and repeated forgiveness and determination of the one who truly loved, managed to wear that true love away, bit by bit, tiny piece by tiny piece.

The one, instead of  helping the other to build a stone wall of enduring love that would support them both, indulged in incidences large and small, of indifference, neglect, and selfishness, betrayal and abuse, one after the other after the other ~ like water dripping on a stone, each small impact pulverizing a minute part that was then washed away, until the ever-fixed mark has been all but obliterated.

I will never understand people who, for the gratification of the moment, will neglect those most essential and life-sustaining gifts of love freely given.

Everyone deserves to be loved so, and to know the over-flowing joy of truly loving that person in return. I wish it for all of you ~