Archives for posts with tag: hello love

I woke to a brand new day, this morning.  I slept well and deeply – if you have a sleep disorder, or anxiety, or suffer from ‘existential dread’, or struggle with your person demons in the wee hours before dawn, you already know what a good night’s sleep can mean for the dawn of a new day.  If you don’t, please take a moment to appreciate the delight and power of good sleep.  🙂  Yesterday now feels like…well…yesterday.  That’s nice.  It wasn’t so long ago that a day of fighting hormones and tears would have lingered, mingled with regret and frustration, and become a thing all its own.  It was a gentle life lesson, as life lessons go, and a good way to really highlight the power of mindfulness in my life.  I’m ok with that.

It has been a mindful morning, so far, and a lovely one.  I feel calm and balanced.  I enjoyed the leisurely start to the day, and delighted in the brief, sleepy ‘good morning’ of a lover wandering through the kitchen, only to remark further “I’m going back to bed, I’m not ready to be awake yet.”  Warmth, and love, and tender consideration shown in his effort to wake early enough to chill together a few minutes were as meaningful as if he had actually been ‘ready to be awake’.  I smiled for a long while after I heard his footsteps heading down the hall, and the quiet click of the door as he returned to the land of dreams.

Another rose blooms...and even the bugs are happy; this one must be tasty.

Another rose blooms…and even the bugs are happy; this one must be tasty.

The walk in to work was one more delight this morning, sunny, mild, and the air is filled with the scent of flowers and the sound of birdsong… easy enough to photograph flowers, but try as I might, I can’t capture birdsong in a picture.

New life - potted annual flowers reaching breaking through the soil.

New life – potted annual flowers reaching breaking through the soil.

My garden is always the first stop on my commute to work. New seedlings reach for the sun from pots along the walkway. “Baby Love” keeps right on blooming. All the roses are fat with buds now, and beginning to open.

"Baby Love" blooming first, and likely all through the summer and into fall.

“Baby Love” blooming first, and likely all through the summer and into fall.

So, here it is Tuesday, and the smile I am wearing matches the song in my heart. It’s a very nice feeling – and if I could I would share it with the whole world.  There’s entirely too much misery, more than enough to go around, and too many people getting more than their share…but I am learning, too, that we each have to walk our own path, find our own way, and create our own solutions, however much we think we have ‘figured it out’, it is always entirely individual and unique to who we are, and we can only share our lives and successes, our ways and understandings, with people who choose to share them.  🙂

Oh, and…

Wild roses are blooming.

Wild roses are blooming.

 

 

 

Morning in the garden.

Morning in the garden.

I enjoy love songs. That wasn’t always true. There was a time – and it amounts to most of my adult life – when I thought love songs were at best saccharine nonsense, and at worst outright lies.  I dismissed them with cynical derision, frankly, often, and out loud.  I couldn’t connect with love songs – what did I know of love?  I really figured sex, and a basic mostly supportive sort of affection, were all that went into the matter of love, and all that one could get out of it.  I wasn’t lonely much, and because I enjoy solitude and can easily entertain myself for hours and days with the content of my own mind, I barely noticed how difficult it was to really ‘connect’.  I couldn’t feel the lack of what I didn’t know.

Lovers came and went (lol) and life did what life does. Time passed. I aged. I experienced events. I met people. I had relationships.  Eventually, long past the time I had given up on any notion of love as a profound connected emotional experience, I fell in love. I fell hard. I fell fast.  Initially, I struggled to understand – or even accept – my experience.  I treated it as lust – I was comfortable with that emotion.  At some point I began to understand it was truly new, and slowly let myself feel the raw power of it, to be open to it – all the way, heart and mind and soul.  ‘Powerful’ doesn’t describe it, really, and I have not yet experienced anything else quite like it.  I changed my lifestyle because love is too powerful to dismiss as a catalyst for change.  Again and again, I have revisited who I am; questions of values, of taste, of experience, of will, of intent became not only important, but seemingly truly urgent for the first time since I was a teenager… love is amazing stuff.   More than once since I fell into the warm embrace of love, I’ve found myself sitting with my lover and listening to love songs…laughing, crying, singing along, hearing precious heartfelt words being sung to me, souls connected.  It is simply the most precious and amazing feeling in all my experience… there really aren’t words to describe it, and no winning argument to convince someone who hasn’t experienced love that it is real.  In that regard, it is rather like mindfulness… and I’m finding that mindful love goes even beyond what I’ve already experienced, although I am so new to practicing mindfulness, I expect life will continue to unfold in amazing ways on a lot of levels. 🙂

Yeah…I’ve learned to appreciate love songs.

…But…love isn’t the every day experience in our lives, is it? Maybe for a rare or fortunate few, but for ‘everyone’? It doesn’t seem likely, although it does seem possible.  There’s just this one thing, though…what’s up with people treating each other so badly? Is it really necessary to bring emotional weaponry to every conversation, every moment of conflict resolution? Is the default assumption for most people that even their lovers, their families, their best friends are actually just waiting for an opportunity to fuck them over or hurt them? No? Then why do so many people behave as if that is their experience? What’s up with the defensiveness? What’s up with being mean to each other? What’s up with not taking a moment to hear that someone we love is hurting, and accepting that it is their experience, and offering our regret in a sincere way first, before leaping to our own defense to explain, deny, mitigate, deflect, or actually counter attack?  Seriously? How can any human being justify treating their loves less well than they treat the world?

We’ve all got baggage. Everyone has their turn hurting. Sooner or later even people we love may cause us pain or stress.  Does that mean we stop loving?  I don’t at all understand the lack of consideration and every day decency I see all around me.  What the hell, people? Is it that hard to treat one another truly well? Why do we lash out at the ones we love? I don’t have answers.  I am a simple student of life and love, and there is so much I do not know, or understand.

I’m very fortunate – I easily could have been someone who would never know love. I didn’t exactly make it easy for love to reach me through my walls, or find me midst my mountain of baggage.  I love, though, I love fiercely, and I love with my whole heart…and I want to master treating my loves well.  Turns out I will have to start with treating myself well, and as a result of that effort I am experiencing a love affair with a most amazing being with whom I have long been acquainted…myself.  I admit – that’s a love I never knew would also be profound.