Living In Love with Life
Janice Lynne Lundy, Editor
(Photo credit Evgeni Dinev)
What about life lures you into love?
Not the love born of romantic tales and movies, but a soul enrapturing love that takes up residence in your heart.
Its the kind of love that moves into the room behind your eyes and stays there. Somehow, somewhere, because of something in particular or nothing at all, you woke up one day to realize that everything was different. Love had moved in and you were seeing everything—everyone—through the lenses of love.
That’s the kind of love that’s difficult to capture in the sentiment of a Hallmark card. It’s a wordless sort of love that comes upon us when we have walked and searched and filleted ourselves open to life as it has presented itself—flowers and thorns, all. It's the experience of “full catastrophe living,” that mindfulness teacher, Jon Kabat-Zinn describes.
By giving ourselves over to life as it is, we surrender into the beauty and pain of it. And what’s so incredibly ironic—through the walking, the falling, the getting back up again—we change. For the better. We actually live into our true nature which is love, which is joy, which is basic goodness.
Who knew.
American writer, Peter Matthiessen, put it this way:
“Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions and abstractions. Simple free (being) becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines, and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. And that day ... we become seekers. “
Seekers of love.
And I suspect this search is a search for love with a capital “L.” We long for that all-compassing, consuming, indescribable, forever kind of love. We seek it in one another, in God, in friends, in activities, nature, and pets. We even seek it within ourselves if we’re lucky enough to realize that self-love is the doorway to “other love.”
And yet ... and yet ... often our search comes up empty-handed. It’s the searching too hard for, the grasping, and hanging on to for fear of losing it that seems to create such an elusive companion. Love, the “never found.”
But it can be found—and fully ours—if we can simply let go. Let go.
If we can simply stop looking for it ... stop hunting, comparing, judging. This is it. No, it’s not. It must be over there.
If we can relax into this breath, into this moment, open our eyes and see—really see—all that is here right in front of us, Love is here.
This is the love of life of which I speak. The “Great Mystery” of life. And Matthiessen was right. At that vital moment of piercing, the experience of this is all so new to us (yet also so deeply understood on some level—a soul remembering, if you will), that we can drift in and out of it for years unrecognized. Feeling the connection, not feeling it, certain that it still lies outside of us—somewhere, out there—so we strive to “capture” it again.
Let go ....
Each of our writers this month expresses in her unique way what being “In Love with Life” can mean—without all the searching.
Uncovered Buddha Chick experiences it as the joy of moment-by-moment transformation. Laura Hegfield sees it in the smallest elements of life—raindrops, twigs, leaves. Kaveri Patel partakes by loving herself more. Lisa Erickson invites us to embrace heart energy through our body/mind system, the chakras. Danielle Rutledge witnesses it in her children as they turn their own faces inward and engage the Light within. And there are more ...
Our February issue of Buddha Chick Life is a raiment of many colors, resplendent with the multi-hued ways we can live in love with life.
Poet Ingrid Goff-Maidoff seems to have summarized our relentless search for Love best in her poem, “Love Your Life.” She writes:
“Now, moving in this world, you know that love is the greatest fortune. Only, you will not amass it: you are it.”
May your journey seeking Love end today. May it end here with this realization that, indeed, you are It.
Life itself is It.
How could It be otherwise?
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