On A Way of Love
Good Monday Morning!
Unbelievably, it is June and I haven’t made it here on a Monday morning for almost 2 months! This Monday morning I am here from Nova Scotia once again, writing from a small horse farm that sits at the edge of a salt marsh that opens into the Northumberland Strait. This is a place I love, a place that has fostered my love with a kind of gentle but relentless impartial reality, a reckoning of land and sea, sky and earth, humans and horses. I have written from here at least two or three times a year now for all the years I have been writing to you.
It has been my practice for over 5 years now, to show up and write to you from my heart on these Monday mornings. My heart is ever spontaneous, ever tender and ever so much an aching mess. It is, however, an aching mess of love. Love, a word that I often avoid, a word overused in my estimation for things that really don’t resemble love and yet, I use it now so I can explain.
Love, in the way I want to use it here and now, is a way of being present. I didn’t make that up. That definition comes from David Richo and I like it. I may even have mentioned it before here, so forgive it if I think it bears repeating. My practice most days involves exactly this; showing up and choosing to be present. [And this “showing up and choosing to be present” is an incantation from the ever-luminous Angeles Arrien on the path of the Warrior] I am present in my aching mess of a heart, present in my often aching mess of a body, present in my most decidedly aching spirit. But all this aching, is a sign of life, of use, of engagement. A sign of love itself.
I don’t want to say that my experience with love as a way has been easy or painless. Quite the opposite is true. I have resisted, fought even, a way of love. I have tried; tried relentlessly, tried hard, tried with all my might and mind to do things differently. I have tried to fashion a way, invent a way, hammer out a way, discuss, bargain, even sell, a way other than love to myself. And here I am.
Sheepishly, humbly, quietly, simply, I don’t know the way. “The” is the operative word there. I don’t know “the” way. The way is ever elusive, changing even as I tread what I think is a known path. But if all I need is “a” way, then love shows up. A way, certainly not the only way, but a way. That little shift, that little one word shift, makes everything possible. All I need is a way.
This week, here on the farm, I had the opportunity to be with a dying horse, to share space and sky with his last breath, his large graceful form and his generous gentlemanly spirit. Inexplicably, this felt like true love, a deep and undying love, a presence eternal and ephemeral all at once, sharing space with all the elements, all the humans, all the animals, all the grass, flowers, insects, all things living and dying. Real true love.
I won’t even try to pretend I can say something spectacularly meaningful about love, the experience of presence, the experience of aching. These are things particular to each of us, each moment, each day, each place, each time. But I can say that love is a way to discover what is true in a given moment, what is actual, real for each of us. It is a way to find peace and possibility. In the worst of moments it is only love as a way of being present, as a willingness to experience, to be with, to be in, to be what is true, that has provided a footfall, a bench, a stone, a place on the sand.
A love like this, palpable and mysterious, joins me with the elements, with my body, with my heart, though it does not take away my aching, the pain that lets me know I am alive. Instead, it acts like nourishment, like a food that completely satisfies without any need for distinction or drama, a food I cannot live without. This, a way of love, having its way with me.
