Today is garbage day, symbolic in a way, and the last one before Thanksgiving. My list today was gratitude for discarded things: old beliefs, old relationships, old clothes, my mother’s left-behind possessions—I am grateful for the celebrations that could not have taken place without them, and grateful to release these burdens.
I am grateful for the loves I have known and those I will not know, for books I have read and books I will not read, grateful for the place each released person or object or belief has held, so that now, as I rejoice in the release of it, I recognize and appreciate the space that has opened in my life. I am grateful to sugar, for all the comfort it has brought me, and grateful to let it go. I am grateful to my family, for my having belonged to neither my mother’s nor my father’s side of the tree so that as I explore this other than conventional life, my otherness is not uncomfortable, unfamiliar. I am grateful to be untied from family rituals that feel like obligations to me. All of these releases that once felt like disconnection have come to feel more like freedom as I have stopped resisting, stopped struggling against letting go.
In the wake of this untying, I am free to live a life that I have envisioned: to think, to feel, to speak my truth to myself and others, to build, to make, to teach, to evolve, to preach love to the outcasts and freaks, to anyone who has ever felt like she may not fit in, who has whittled away at herself in order to please someone whose love she felt unworthy of receiving. It is true: we are unworthy of love… that kind of emotionally expensive, insidiously self-destructive love that would exact the price of dimming ourselves rather than celebrating our wildest nature and being true to our own souls. We are utterly unworthy of that kind of love that demands that we forego kindness to ourselves and others, that we stifle our own voices, suppress our own stories, and adjust to “normal” to fit into a box labeled “lovable.” I am unworthy of that brand of love.
The love of which I am worthy is divine, celebratory, non-judgmental, accepting, unprejudiced, and patient. I will give that kind of love, and I will accept no other kind in return.I have struggled for so long with a fear that I was unworthy of love, and I was right, but it was such a small, man-made love; there was never enough to go around.
Only a massive, bright, universal, elemental love can encircle me, for I am enormous. My magnitude is inconceivable to the human mind—only the heart with its divine wisdom can fathom how vast an expanse I fill, so how could any mortal man love me with any simple human love? How could some earthly being wrap some small kind of love around my great, spiritual mass and aspire to keep me warm?
I am the universe; it is in me, in each of us. Without a big enough love, a love that extends to all of humanity, how can we fully love the person standing right in front of us? Our love must be like water; it must cover most of the planet and sink into the earth, it must be pure, we must offer it freely to everyone, including ourselves, and it must be what we are made of.
