Love Your Life
by Ingrid Goff-Maidoff
Photo image by Andy Newson
The lines in this poem say, “Love your Life.” They ask us to love our life as if it were our beloved; to love our life as a lover would love—not as an end-point receiver of all good things, but as an intimate partner, a loving participant. The poem asks us to approach our life with curiosity, pleasure, appreciation, forgiveness, compassion, playfulness, awe—to love as a lover in the deepest sense of the word.
Love Your Life
And a voice will come from the stillness
to give these words: Love your life.
You will know from its deep urging
to let go the well-worn list
of all you thought you first needed.
Begin here, freely,
from this muddy place.
It doesn’t matter if you are broken,
empty-handed, shabby.
Go now, into the day:
the open fields, markets,
the long trail to the sea.
Find all the ways
a lover loves the Beloved:
each hidden bloom, unspoken wound,
vagary of heart.
Become a brave and willing traveler
in a wild, forgotten terrain ~
a realm of intimate tender relating,
infinite mystery, un-tethered joy.
Now, moving in this world, you know
that love is the greatest fortune.
Only, you will not amass it:
you are it.
~Ingrid Goff-Maidoff
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Ingrid is a poet, artist, writer and an anthologist with gratitude to a long lineage of mystics, teachers, theologians, skeptics and saints from all ages and around the globe who have lived in awareness of oneness and of joy. For more than twenty years, Ingrid has shared her love for spiritual inquiry, poetry, beauty, and the wisdom traditions of the world through her books, cards, retreats, e-offerings and gifts. It gives Ingrid deep pleasure to help others feel more whole, more spacious, centered, and more intimate with their own lives. Her books include The Joy Book, The Honey Sutras, Good Mother Welcome, What Holds Us, Moonlight and Remembrance, Simple Graces for Every Meal, The Abundance of Grace, and many quote anthologies. Ingrid lives with her husband and two daughters on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. She may be found online at www.TendingJoy.com
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