Love
Taking The One Hand You Know Belongs In Yours
LOVE.
Do you remember the first time you told someone you loved them?
Or the first time someone said they loved you?
Adrienne Rich wrote that “in any honorable relationship we earn the right to use the word love through a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved”.
Reading that makes me smile because who are we kidding, it is terrifying.
Especially the first time.
Love is also one of those words that gets overused. I confess I am guilty of it. We seem to drain the meaning of the word love when we misuse and overuse it. The more we say we “love” things and people we merely like- or admire, or appreciate, we innocently abrade it with insincere sentiments.
It feels like a worthy effort to keep the integrity of the word and reserve it for those who have earned the right to hear it.
Right?
Mmmm…Maybe.
Maybe not.
There was a day that I would have wholeheartedly agreed with that statement, but now I don’t.
I don’t think it’s ever ideal not to be honest or to say we love things if we don’t, but I do believe that if we shift ourselves and learn to love others unconditionally we experience a peace and unshakeable kind of love in life that is hard to even imagine.
We can of course have our preferences and discernments, but this is something else entirely.
In the introduction to Diane Ackerman's A Natural History of Love, she declares "Love is the great intangible. Everyone admits that love is wonderful and necessary, yet no one can agree on what it is."
We use the word love so casually that it can mean almost nothing or absolutely everything. No definition ever feels like enough so suffice it to say that word is cloaked in mystery and no surprise that most people find it hard to define what they mean when they use the word "love."
I used to think it was an emotion or a feeling for someone, or something but now I suspect it’s much, much bigger than that.
I suppose Jesus tried to teach about love to his disciples and followers, but I’m not sure even they understood the metaphysical implications of this powerful ego melting kind of love he taught, because it’s still foreign to most of us. Especially in our often judgemental and confused Christian household.
Maybe that’s why we need poetry in our lives, because we can place our observations more delicately in round about ways so that the words disappear and only a wistful truth remains.
David Whyte does that for me. I’ll leave you one of his beautiful poems today.
So does Mary Oliver.
There is a poem in her book Felicity: Poems that to be honest, I’m not even sure I know what it means, like many of the poems I read.
It could be about anything that sparks our hearts or makes us abandon thought altogether, but I like imagine it’s how we surrender to love…
I did think, let’s go about this slowly.
This is important. This should take
some really deep thought. We should take
small thoughtful steps.
But, bless us, we didn’t
I’m not sure what love is, but that’s how it feels to me.
We can’t help it, we just dive in both feet first. We jump first and think second.
It has us abandon all reason.
It saunters into town when we least expect it and sweeps us away.
The compelling stranger smiling at us, the puppy at the Humane Society with those sad hopeful expectant eyes, the newborn baby in our arms. Our brains seem to go offline and our rational minds leave the building.
When there is a catastrophe, a flood or a hurricane we risk our lives to save others when we don’t think first, or take small thoughtful steps after some really deep thought.
One thing is certain, it’s easy to understand how metaphysically it could be the most powerful healing force on earth. It’s also FREE and it’s for everyone, but the unconditional kind is sadly foreign to many of us.
So that is the kind I’d like to share with you this month.
I’m just curious if you’ve ever REALLY thought about it.
What does LOVE mean to you?
From experience and speaking with others, it seems that love is much more bewildering and unknowable than we like to admit.
“Our confusion about what we mean when we use the word "love" is the source of our difficulty in loving.
If our society had a commonly held understanding of the meaning of love, the act of loving would not be so mystifying.”
Bell Hooks
Maybe our problems stem in part from our Dictionary definitions of love that tend to emphasize romantic love, defining love as "profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person, especially when based on sexual attraction."
That seems to align nicely with the Hollywood version of love. So why would A Course In Miracles call that a “special relationship”.
Specifically state that what we call love is not love.
But something else entirely.
A Course In Miracles is clear that only one kind of love exists and while it’s more than can be taught or understood by us, it’s not what we experience when we have a romantic relationship with certain conditions, it refers only to the unconditional kind.
I can glean the deeper meaning and it resonates as more true, but I can remember my ego resisting that idea when I first read it.
My mind argued that it coudn’t possibly all be the same kind of love...romantic love is very different from the love we have for our children. Isin’t it?
Different than the love we have for our parents, our pets and our work. What about chocolate glazed Timbits? I was more with the philosophers in Ancient Greece that preferred to separate them out and had at least 6 or 7 differentiations ( agápē, érōs, philía, philautía, storgē, xenía etc..) but only ONE?
How ON EARTH could there only be one kind love?
Let’s just set that aside for now and sit with the question this week to be shown more about the true nature of this love the Course speaks about. The still rare unconditional varitey may be the one and only valiant gift we have to give.
It could also be the solution to most if not ALL of the problems we’ll ever face individually or collectively. It aligns also perfectly with our theme this year of getting radical. Expanding our own definitions of love could be the root cause of our ability to solve the biggest personal, political, environmental, and social issues we all face.
And sadly the very last place our egos would ever think to look or take seriously.
Woo Woo is the term we like to use.
From where I’m sitting now, this more divine version of love is so much more encompassing than merely loving certain carefully chosen people, places, or things that “deserve” it.
It also has nothing really to do with the word or moniker “love” or how many times a day we use it.
This month let’s zoom out to the greater topic of love and see what is possible when we align with this power that is available for us just beyond our old egoic ways of thinking and being.
I suppose until we awaken to this love, our ego and our intellects are like a closed door to this part of us that can love others this way. Our minds are conditioned to see the way we do by a thought system based in fear. It’s understandable and it can also be changed.
What IF it’s true that loving others unconditionally frees and heals all of us?
Are you curious to learn how?
INNERstanding: What’s deepest in you is LOVE.
When I was in life coaching school 25 years ago I was asked to come up with a name or an archetypal symbol that would represent my essence all I could come up with was this sketched heart. Love. Fromage, I know, but there was more to this and while a shallow part of me sensed it, it took me another 25 years for me to feel this deeper truth and see the higher intelligence at play in my own energy field.
Now that I am beginning to experience this healing love on a new experiential level, there is not much else on my mind these days other than embodying and sharing this love with others.
It feels like total peace. Freedom. No arguing or fighting. Less thinking. Like even my own critical inner voice that used to dominate my mind daily has moved far away and rarely comes to see me any more.
I scribbled a heart like this one on a “HELLO MY NAME IS” sticker which ended up on the cover of my school journal which I suspect had a bigger impact on me than everything I learned in the life coaching course.
It recently dawned on me that life coaching and self help has of course been helpful to negotiate my life in some ways, but I see now that it was more about managing my own ego and the resulting psychology to help make the best of it. I was always playing at the level of effect, on the defence and setting goals to have my needs met from that place.
I wasn’t getting RADICAL enough. I wasn't able to find the root cause of my suffering in any narrative about my childhood or perception of what “happened” to me. It may have helped me cope and soothed me on some level temporarily, but it never healed me. I never felt free.
Now I do.
Learning about the true meaning of love is about deconstructing our ego entirely which we can all do in our lifetime. I
We can awaken to this truth WHILE living a beautiful life.
THIS is by far the most practical teaching I’ve ever learned.
By simply loving others as they are. Not trying to change or fix them, not even a tiny meddle can be a game changer. Seeing their true nature beneath the surface and leaving the rest up to their own intuition and inner guidance system unless they ask for help or our opine, otherwise we keep our yawps shut.
It will feel foreign at first and like mastering anything worthwhile it takes practice.
This love gives us permission to not only stop judging others but also ourselves. We leave the shame and guilt cycle for good. Hop off and go within to be guided to what is best for our own Soul’s development and the greater good.
It seems too good to be true.
As most of you know, as a Metaphysician and a Reverend I’m sometimes asked to marry couples. The photo above was from the last wedding in 2023 for this amazing young couple who met in a dog park in Toronto.
They had a touching love story that all started at a dog park - her dog ran off and took a liking to his dog (and his breakfast sandwich) and it all unfolded like a Hallmark movie. I don’t have a wedding website or adverstise my services publically, but they found me through a mutual friend…in a dog park (of course:).
It was a beautiful day and people came from all over the world. It’s such an honor to witness two people who are ready and excited to make a commitment to do the work of loving one another. You could FEEL the love emanating from the crowd. The wedding party actually DANCED down the aisle. I mean, not just swaying to the music, they really got down in a flash mobby kind of way.
The energy was palpable.
You can see it in their lit up faces.
Love. It’s a beautiful sight.
I find it fascinating that no two ceremonies are ever alike. They seem to reflect the couples unique values, beliefs, cultures and I have a deep reverence for the whole ceremony and the vows. But the part I enjoy crafting the most is at the very beginning when I take a moment to tell their love story. I like to survey some family and friends before the ceremony to learn more about the couple and I weave them together into a meaningful tapestry and tell the story to open the ceremony as everyone gets settled. How they met, what their first date was like from both sides, what family and friends observe about them as a couple and what led to their wedding day. It’s in telling their story that I see their faces lit up with a smile and their bodies relax.
It takes courage for two people to make that big commitment. To stand behind sincere expression and exchange their vows in front of family and friends with tenderness and conviction.
I don’t think we need a piece of paper or even a ceremony to have this bond, that’s up to you but life can throw us curve balls and it sure is nice to have someone by our side to help us through life. I sure have appreciated my husband Scott over the years. He’s not only my best friend but he’s taught me more with his silence, patience with me (even when it was running thin) and unconditional love than any words or gestures ever could.
The older I get, the simpler it seems to me to align to this love and have it lead the way.
Our real purpose is to be love. To be a soft place to land when life happens. To be there for our partners, our children, our neighbors, and strangers.
From the photo above you’d think that this month is all about romantic love, but this has nothing to do with your relationship status and everythign to do with YOU.
Your relationship to ALL of life.
To give our love unconditionally, to give our forgiveness freely and whatever else we have that we can to make others lives feel a bit more blessed and in the process we free and save ourselves.
“What is love but acceptance of the other, whatever he is.”
Anaïs Nin
We seem to fumble through our marriages and even our friendships and family relationships falling again and again into the giant crevasse between our ideas about love and the reality of life with all of the work that needs doing. From the dirty dishes, laundry, hormones, kids, and the holidays, birthdays, pets to care and to earn a living to pay our bills.
Can you think of the last conflict you had with someone you love?
What do you think caused it?
I’m guessing some kind of misunderstanding or judgement is at the root of it.
We are of course always well aware of each other’s short comings, but instead of offering unolicited advice or pointing out the sliver in another’s eye we love them as they are and work on the log in our own as the Bible recommends. We don’t even judge them in the quiet sanctum of our own minds. Not their choices, their bodies, their new love interests.
NADA.
Just love them. That’s it.
I once heard David Whyte say this in a talk that to me hit the nail on the head of how this unconditional love is both realistic and beneficial in ALL of our relationships, even with our own children:
In the course of the years a close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves, to remain friends we must know the other and their difficulties and even their sins and encourage the best in them, not through critique but through addressing the better part of them, the leading creative edge of their incarnation, thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves.
Yeeeeees David Whyte!!! Thank you for always finding the words to express what I need to say in a way I could never.
The love we’re taught culturally seems to be the exact OPPOSITE of what the ancient wisdom teachings mean when they say, love. It really is conditional or based on others meeting our needs or fitting into our agendas and expectations and if not, we cut them off.
We stop calling, we get divorced or estranged.
We end it. Sometimes badly.
We have the best intentions and we try to “consciously uncouple” for the sake of our children, but do we really ever do that when our buttons get pushed by the special someone that knows how to push them better than anyone?
These relationships have “special” conditions and when those are not met then we often don’t just gracefully bow out of our contracts, we try to annihilate one another. That’s because special love is egoic in nature and can quickly turn into special hate.
Maybe we do need to part ways with people, but doesn’t something feel a bit “off” when one minute we are family, best friends or lovers telling each other we love one another and the next day, they are GONE from our lives or everything turns sour and awkward.
What just happened?
Our egos did.
Not to be morbid here, but the statistics speak for themselves. Between 2011 and 2021, police reported 1,125 gender-related homicides of women and girls in Canada. Of these homicides, two-thirds (66%) were perpetrated by an intimate partner, 28% by a family member, 5% by a friend or acquaintance, and the remaining 1% by a stranger.
The same person that just a month before we considered to be “our person” or our beloved family is now written us out of their life for good.
But we’re taught that love NEVER harms.
Again, not saying we have stay in a relationship, but once this is understood in an embodied way, we would never even need the word divorce in our vocabulary. Even if we did separate we’d never need a lawyer or a contract.
It would be amicable. Loving. And there’s a better chance we’d have worked things out ourselves.
Our brains can hardly fathom that kind of experience of love, but it’s here now.
For ALL of us.
“For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks…the work for which all other work is but preparation”.
Rilke
What if this love is not even separable from us?
In the chapter of my book this line seemed to resonate with some readers. From memory it went something like this…
“We’re not here learning how to be love, we ARE love learning how to be here.”
Love is the force behind all of creation.
It’s the life force that animates our bodies.
And this love is “true” and is never swayed.
Shakespeare seems to agree with this concept of love. Never changing or dependent on external behaviors or conditions and control…we often hear this Sonnet at weddings but do any of us REALLY understand what it means?
“Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken.”
Love is the source of all there is. We don’t stop loving when life gets hard.
When mistakes are made.
That is not love given freely. That is a love with limitations and special conditions.
Or a “special relationship”.
When we love this way we don’t ever need to cut off what our ego would call “toxic” friends because they “lower our vibe”. We wouldn’t need to choose sides when our best friends who are dating or married split up because we’d never pick a side and continue to love and support them both. We wouldn’t stop speaking to our family if they decided not to get the covid vaccine and we think they should.
This love is the ultimate lifter of vibrations, it clears lifetimes of karma and energy blocks in an instant.
This unconditioned love is self-organizing and self-correcting when it’s given freely.
In other words, things sort themselves out beautifully with our ever getting too involved. Just being fully present.
It works like nature. A balanced ecosystem when we get out of its way and mind our own business.
Our true nature cannot judge or lie, only our ego can do that. Our egos only exist in fear in our own minds, in the past or future in our thoughts…never in the present moment.
When you think about it, there are about four billion men and 3.95 billion women. How does that even happen that half of us are male and half are female (and some of us are somewhere in between:) It’s a perfect balance.
Do we do anythign to make this happen? No. It’s the intelligence running our planet, not up to us or I’m sure that number would be skewed dangerously with our ridiculous egoic preferences for a certain sex.
If there is even a tiny possibility that only ONE kind of love exists, could knowing more about it not be the most important thing we could learn about?
The kind that works miracles and moves mountains.
It has the power to transform not only our own lives but also the world.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth.
Corinthians 13
Not irritable or resentful? Is that even possible?
YES. Yes it is and it’s a choice we make.
It’s only when we stop judging others that we’ll ever have a hope of ending the cycle of guilt, shame and the incessant internal judgment of ourselves.
This love ends our suffering.
The word "love" is most often defined as a noun, yet theorists acknowledge that we would all love better if we used it as a verb.
I caught our neighbour accross the road in the act of love last week…(haha no, this is not R-rated!)
I later found out that the neighbour he was helping had just had surgery. He’s in his 80’s and he did it when no one was looking (except the creeper in her bedroom across the road:) This week he’d need a snowblower but back to love, that seems like a good example of love as a verb.
He’s asking for nothing. He’s serving. Aligned with love.
I have always been drawn to a much more expansive definition of love like…
Love is who we are at our depths.
“Love is not really an action that you do. Love is what and who you are, in your deepest essence. Love is a place that already exists inside of you, but is also greater than you.”
Richard Rohr
M. Scott Peck's classic 1978 self-help book The Road Less Traveled echoes the work of Erich Fromm, who defines love as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth."
"Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love."
Morgan Scott Peck (Psychiatrist & Author)
If the choice must be made, this definition counters the more widely accepted assumption that we love instinctually.
What do you think?
It wasn’t until I deep a deep dive into Spirituality that I discovered an entirely new meaning that shifted everything for me including my relationships.
The premise being that we simply can’t give what we don’t have. And yet we all do have it and it’s been here all along, we’re just asleep to it.
Unaware of what is potential in us. This is THE truth that sets us free.
How we define love will be a function of the realization of our own true nature. It’s not only that we get to define it for ourselves, it’s that we EXPERIENCE our own definitions like a mirror reflecting it back to us in ALL of our relationships.
We can only rise and fall in proportion to our wholeness in a world that is constantly dividing us all into fragments of ourselves.
I have no real agenda and I’m not pre-planning out the next stacks in my mind, I’m going to let love lead the way and see where it takes us.
As always, feel free to reach out if you have any questions or if you need a friend.
Today let’s begin to clear our minds and release our fields of anything that is precluding us from receiving this unconditional love. Let’s dismantle the obstacles that are blocking our ability to stand in our knowing.
Love is the key. It always has been.
This palpable high vibratory energy that no one can describe or define.
Let’s do as Rumi suggests and sell our cleverness…and buy bewilderment for what this power that created us can do.
I LOVE YOU.
I really, really, really do.
Rev Nona
Today’s gift: Truelove
David Whyte on racing beyond our limiting beliefs about the love we deserve. Read here by David himself in his sonorous Irish-tinted English voice…
THE TRUELOVE
by David WhyteThere is a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours,
especially if you have
waited years and especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you this way.I am thinking of faith now
and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are
worthy of in this world.Years ago in the Hebrides,
I remember an old man
who walked every morning
on the grey stones
to the shore of baying seals,
who would press his hat
to his chest in the blustering
salt wind and say his prayer
to the turbulent Jesus
hidden in the water,and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
waking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to themand how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly
so Biblically
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to loveso that when
we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and everything confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’t
because finally
after all this struggle
and all these years
you simply don’t want to
any more
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness
however fluid and however
dangerous to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.
p.s. This week’s climate tip is about Valentines’ Day. I confess I do enjoy seeing the special holiday sections in the drug store as much a anyone, but will collectively spending *25.9 billion dollars on heart shaped boxes filled with so-so tasting chocolates and Halmark cards really help our relationships?
Instead this year could we take a few minutes to use our creativity and make our own with what we have at home? An old photo framed? A funny poem that rhymes? “Coupons” for thoughtful gestures that can be redeemed with no expiry? A meaningful playlist for our special someone?
(*2023 forecast by the National Retail Federation (NRF) and Prosper Insights & Analytics. )