Loving

I think I am beginning to feel what love is.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that after spending as many years on the planet as I have, I would have already known what love really felt like, but no. Not being loved like this. Not loving like this.

Oh, I had an idea about love. Many ideas. An ideal. A dream. A destiny.

And I loved, as best I could. With my whole heart, the part that was open. I really did. I loved and was loved to the best of my ability at the time.

I also knew a lot about what love is not. My heart stretched across the distance between the one (what love is) and the other (what love is not), stretching so thin and so tight that it snapped, thread ends dangling into space. Now I am taking up those gossamer threads and weaving them into a beautiful tapestry, strand by strand and color by color, my heart becoming more alive and more filled in every breath, every kiss, every intertwined beat.

And loving, and being loved, fills me. I am challenged and entranced. I want more: more love, more to love. Sometimes I feel dwarfed by the enormity of possibility, feeling this whole heart beating next to mine, feeling my whole self warmed by its presence. It is so big and I am so small. And other times I close doors because I fear they will close of their own accord, leaving me gasping and sobbing, alone, on the other side. But mostly I breathe and laugh and receive, feeling my cells fill with sparkles, beaming them out again into the universes multiplying beside me, feeling the warm reverberations deep in my soul that tell me I am walking with destiny.