There was once an old, collective dream that opening our hearts was going to feel safe, that somehow love, and loving relationships promised this shelter and sense of well-being.
We assumed or believed that allowing another to matter was going to be easy, that a loving container for grief, for tenderness, for fragmentation was somehow going to allow us to bypass the raw, and at times unbearable feelings associated with heartbreak. We shared the belief that in the end, somehow, love wouldn’t be the force that shattered the known. Love would protect us from pain. We imagined that entering into a transformative process meant we’d be stepping into some protected, resolved, untouchable state where we could transcended the sensitivity of being an open, naked, alive human being. That somehow healing meant we’d have access to life on one narrow, beautiful and pain-free band of the spectrum. But healing and transformation are not only heavenly and transcendent, but also of the descending currents, the moon, the earth, the mud and the soil, and at times will take us to dust. Love and Life-itself has very little interest in our fantasies of invulnerability, our trances of mastery and control, or our imaginings about wiggling into some sustained transcendent state. Life is just too wild for that, too creative, too pregnant, too quantum. Love seeks a vessel in which to come into Life here. We, us humans, in cooperation and collaboration with all nature, are that vessel. Love finds us by way of our vibrating, tender not-knowing, and by our willingness to fall to the ground and start all over again. Sometimes we are broken, sometimes we are whole, sometimes we are a mess, but we are always alive. Love wants access and will take us. When we’re totally naked, love will enter and show us what we are. When the known crumbles away, all that remains is the longing, yearning, receptive heart. There is nothing more alive . . . nothing more sacred . . . than that.
