I Love You Anyway

I want you, anyway.

It seems in this life we constantly strive towards perfection. It’s part of the human condition I say, to constantly seek Better.

I love us for this, for this painful striving. It’s a beautiful gift that births invention, evolution, and expansion.

It’s a beautiful curse that takes us from gratitude to “never enough”. We want the broken things fixed, and the empty things to be filled. Then we want to break the fixed things, and empty what is full.

In this ever-pulsating, boiling stew of creation – where do we find love? Where or what is that thing that we want to roll around in bed with, to spend time refining and building and appreciating?

How do we define purpose?

I propose that your love is that thing you want unconditionally. When there is no time or space for it, but you still you find a way to make time and space.

I invite you think of something that is Yours. An activity or an idea that always lights up for you. Even if it has never seen the light of the manifested world, only lived in the spaces of your mind.

Maybe you’ve tried to bring it to life before, and failed.

Maybe you’ve tried to bring it to life before, and it was ugly. It didn’t look like the idea in your mind.

I invite you to love it anyway. To squeeze it into your life where it doesn’t fit, to lean into its inconvenience. And when you try to grow a piece of it, and it doesn’t work…say “thank you, I love you anyway. I want you anyway”.

I found that true love, true creation from the heart, speaks the language of non-condition. It says yes no matter what.

Say yes no matter what to your creation of choice. Find the yes, find the space no matter what.

If you feel push back, pause. And say, “Ok, I’ll listen. Talk to me.”

I’ve found that this is the language of the universe. It looks for openings, for flow. It doesn’t care if it’s pretty or refined or perfect. If there is space, opportunity, it says “GO”. And as the space widens or flows better elsewhere, it’s “Go there, now”.

If there is no space, it pauses…because Space and Flow are inevitable. An opening is imminent, in perfect timing. So be ready to say yes, even to the tiniest “GO”.

And in this, you practice ‘riding the waves’ with energy, with the universe. You feel how it moves, how it is never dismayed. Because it looks for movement, flow, and timing. All else is less relevant in the attitude of creation. All else, is what it is. Let it be.

Here is the ultimate secret: when you say I could do that “but”, you are not speaking the language of creation. When you say I want to do this “and”, now you’re on track! This is quite literally the language of how things become enlivened.

Feel how limitation feels awful when you feel like you “can’t” and how beautiful it feels when you move the limitation to the side and find a “way”. The universe sees limitation as a gift to creativity.

You are a creative genius, use this gift that you are to gaze at difficulty with a new attitude. Look at the hard things or the limitations straight in the face and breathe, in that moment say to yourself, “I am a creative genius. I am here to play, to create, and to discover.”

What do you want to love anyway? What do you want to pull through the cracks and crevices of your life? I support you. I’ll ride with you, as you make your way, giving endless birth to your love, to your creation.

Take it and Run.

That good feeling that just swept through, that impulse of clarity that quietly peaked and then fell…take it and run. Take it and run into its sweet, misty air. Embrace those small lifts when they come. Notice. Notice when you suddenly feel free, or light in your spirit. Take it and run. Lend your attention to it and say yes.

It doesn’t have to relate to anything, it doesn’t have to fit into the larger world of your circumstances. Let it mean nothing in relation to your life, let it be what it is and say “I see you”.

[ In fact, give yourself the greatest gift you may ever know. Feeling good for no reason, on purpose. ‘Is it because my hair looks good today? Is it because the sun is shining? Is it because I love them?’

No, it’s nothing. Let it be nothing. Grab hold of that joy and say, ‘I live you for no reason. I am joy, for no earthly reason. I gift this to myself, I breathe into it to remind myself.’

Remind yourself of what? Nothing. ]

Those moments are the exact moments when your healing, clarity, and life’s wishes are coming to you. That is where those things live, in the feeling of relief. Relief from carrying your ‘circumstances’ along with you wherever you go. Behind those circumstances is a place where all possibility exists, not beholden to your past or your current details of life.

That place sees you as free, creative, and able. It does not hold you to anything, it does not know you as a concept burdened by thousands of other concepts.

It knows you as Free.

And in those moments where you feel joy, unburdened, creative, excited (especially for no reason) you are living in that space that exists without the stories you’ve built. It invites you to speak the new story.

And that story begins with “I am”.

That story begins with that feeling, “Ahh”. Relief. Possibility. Freedom.

I am relief. I am possibility. I am freedom.

I weave my stories from the place of No Constructs. And so, I begin to build.

Let those moments be an invitation to create your life with more ease.

Let those moments come without substance. Without drink, or food, or drug, or intervention. Let them come in empty moments of mediocrity.

And if they come through substance or activity, say “hello, thank you, I know you. can you also come back for no reason and show me that I don’t need anything specific to find you and live you?”

Then, notice.

Eclipsing Light

I had a friend tell me once that I was a lighthouse. I thought it was a nice thing to say, but I didn’t totally understand what that meant. I guess, simply, someone who emits light.

Then, many years later I met someone and thought…that person is a lighthouse. Because at the time, I was in dark, stormy waters. But in their eyes was something familiar. Like someone lighting a match in the middle of a dark room.

I felt like one of those boats, out in choppy waters on a moon-less night, trying to stay afloat. And there, in the distance and through the fog…a light. A light that says, you are not lost, come this way.

I am reminded of a trip my sister and I took to St. Augustine, FL. She was walking and dancing on a wall of stones by the bay, while the lighthouse in the distance flashed its lights in intervals. I stood with my camera, soaking up the night sky and watching her skirt sway in the wind and in rhythm with her dance.

I had to wait for the times when the light would shine in our direction, to be able to get the picture of it illuminating the scene.

And I now sit here feeling in my heart the importance of darkness and the light, and how one seems to follow the other. And even more so, that when the light isn’t shining in one direction, it’s shining somewhere else.

In May of this year, I lost all of my light. I had nothing to give and nothing to shine on anyone. I thought I might die of nothingness, as all I knew was giving.

This came as a result of “healing”. Healing that was unlike anything I’d known before. It twisted me inside out and backwards, it chewed me up, spit me out and chewed me back up again.

I came face to face with the ugliest parts of me and the ugly in others too. And for the first time, I didn’t want to run. I wanted to know what it was like to stand, tall and wide as an oak tree, face to face with everything I’d run from my whole life.

I wanted to know what would happen next.

And that’s when the light turned off.

But now I know, it didn’t turn off…it changed direction.

It lit up the inside, rather than the outside. I thought I would die, not emitting light to the external world.

And in a way, I did. I turned inside out.

And little by little, I started seeing that light emitting from me again.

May we all know what it’s like to be the lighthouse and to be the ship in dark, stormy waters. Remembering that we’re all in this together, even when we’re alone.

In the Meadows

Does Ease still know my name?

Though I wandered in the valleys of doubt

In the shadow of strain

Swam in rivers of anger

In rage and loathing

Does love still know my name?

I toiled in the mines of Ugly

Tearing away at the walls of disease

Does the light still know my name?

They said, go. Unearth yourself.

Be unafraid of what you find.

And I walked through walls of wind

Head down, my whole body

Fighting against the strength of their power

In this, after this,

Does Ease still know my name?

Can I sit in the meadows of life’s beauty once again?

Will it have me?

In the bright yet gentle sunshine-

Knee high grass and wildflowers

Sitting on the seat of the divine,

Will it still have me?

Do my battered limbs and coal-blackened face

Still have a place

In that meadow?

Will it still have me?