What I Know for Sure: Number Five

“This should have been Number One, but I’m typing as it flows through my mind.. LOVE, love like your life depends upon it because it does. Love yourself in all your magnificent beauty. Love without expectation or terms. Because  love is the one emotion that can be so pure if you will allow it. It can be selfless and powerful all at once. It will surprise you, astound you if you let it in. This is the whole point  of being alive. When in conflict or a hand is extended in connection, never turn away, but turn “towards” in love. Without love and connection, life becomes mediocre when it could be brilliant.” excerpt from https://justasmidgen.com/2019/02/24/what-i-know-for-sure/

I have set pencil to paper so many times, I’ve typed and hit delete when writing this one because, like everyone, I have experienced heartbreak. It took time to heal, to understand what love meant to me, to unpack everything around what I believed and mistakenly believed was Love.

I love to write and draw in pencil because I don’t like to think anything is immutable, solid and unchanging, even the phrase “set in stone” sends waves of panic through me.

I know now, to love is to be free, free to choose who we love and when.. I think the freedom to decide must be inherent, integral to loving someone. Anything other than this cannot be love. Love extended with conditions and contracts is control, not love.

I have loved, at times I have felt like I’ve lost love, I know I’ve felt the pain in the loss of connection. This feels like fear, like grief, even death. But if I choose to believe that Love is found in freedom, then I have to extend this same freedom to those who choose to love me.

Is Love something that actually disappears or does it just change form?

I think Love actually is immutable, but in a different sense, one that does not suffocate or trap.

Love shifts, moves, changes, transforms, evolves through our relationship with another.

It begins here and moves there- it carries us along with it like a river that flows, separates and finds itself again, even after death on the physical plane. We can stand across from one other and say “here is this Love that is between us” and like seeds in soil tilled, decide whether or to tend to it or not, whether to nurture it and so Love grows.

Love responds to this intention- the container of Love can change form, transmogrify.. like a canvas painted together, brush in hand. We can plan what we want to paint, change how it looks as it unfolds, we can even have a blank corner that we want to save for later, for when we have children, for when we grow old. But it is ours and only ours to design together.

How incredibly beautiful is this energy called Love?

We have this moving tranformative drive for connection called Love with everyone who decides to join us on our journey. Each relationship then is its own blank canvas created with the one other or the many others who love us: our beloved plus our families, friends, communities, even the planet.

Sometimes the canvas has to be completely reworked, brushed over with a coat of white to begin anew, but make no mistake, the foundational paint strokes always lay beneath the surface and become the fundamental layer of the relationship. Sometimes this original underpainting shows through a transluscent new wash of paint, it can inform, change and enhance the colors being laid down over top. I think paintings with more layers can become our most beautiful creations.

Some paintings are finished too quickly, they spark brightly and are done- and so we find ourselves longing to begin again, to have this beautiful expanse of white canvas on which to create something completely fresh, something more complex that resonates.

Still other paintings are set aside and picked up again months or years later when we realize they are incomplete.

Some paintings are created over decades of time spent together, layer upon layer, until one person or both know that their work of art is complete and that it is time to part ways, sometimes through death. The painting done, it is time for both to sign in the corner, bathe it in a wash of varnish and place it somewhere special so they can view the life they made when they were together.

So Love is never gone, it shifts, it makes its mark, is there for all time. It rests in a corner of us, a place in our hearts where we can go and say “ah, there is that Love we created together”.

Even the darkest of our canvases began in a place where once beautiful light colors flowed.

There is a recognition that not everyone wants to continue to create with us and no one can commission another to paint for them.

My home has so many canvases, all shapes and sizes, some filled with brilliant color, others darker that evoke the personal growth that took place. But they are all mine to walk past, to remember and know that somewhere, someone else has the same canvas hanging on their wall. What they see, how they interpret the painting, what it means to them is completely personal. Who can go to an art gallery and say that they definitively understand the meaning that a painting is meant to convey?

Most beautiful of all, though, is this place I call home. This space I live in, this mind and heart and spirit I inhabit that I have painted and created out of self Love through all the days I have chosen to Love myself.

Because the Love for oneself is the greatest masterpiece of all, the loving acceptance of every decision, every brush stroke of color set down through the years is ones own. I can go back, acknowledge that while I don’t care for a section of the painting, I can acknowledge that it happened, then paint over it to create a more beautiful and truer self portrait.

This, then, must be forgiveness…

Love,

Barbara

For Susan, who encouraged me to write again for those who quietly read..

The series of paintings that accompany my writing were an intentional exploration of love during a time of contemplation and meditation on the subject of Love. Their order in this passage is intentional. xx