Just finished reading this book. Wanted to share a part of it with you all. It is a bit long and I hope that you find some wisdom or inspiration in her words.
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Every experience I have had in my life has been about the dame thing.
Each lesson has ultimately and absolutely been about one thing, the only thing that is.
Love.
I had heard it said before. Now I understood.
The struggles to learn I had a soul. Mu struggles to learn about my strengths. Even my grief. I had been talking to a woman seated near me at dinner one night, wailing about my pain, my anguish over losing my son, about how close the three of us had been, about the hole in my heart. The woman had turned to her husband. Have you ever loved that deeply? she asked. I don't thinks so, he had said. Even these, my blackest and darkest moments, had been a form of love, one of its lessons. A harder one, but still a lesson of love.
I laughed out loud, alone in my room. What did I think love would look like? Feel like? Be? A romantic vision of being carried off to Camelot? And then what?
Forgiveness Compassion. Service. Self-love. Loving myself when I was certain nobody else loved me or ever would. Then opening up,m learning to let others in.
Faith.
Acceptance. Acceptance of myself, my life, others, their lives.
Friendship. Courage. Perseverance.
Hope.
Joy. Learning to deliberately choose joy. The simple sweet process of learning to be present each moment and find and choose joy, a joy not dependent on outer circumstances, but one that comes from the heart.
How did I think I would learn all these lessons, all these subcategories of love?
Trust. Trusting myself. learning to trust others, life, God.
Learning to play and laugh. Learning to walk away, sometimes learning to stay put. Honoring my own needs, even when they differed from what others thought my needs should be. Honoring me, even when I was different from what others thought I should be. Trusting my vision for my life, creating another vision it that one didn't work. Chasing my dreams, catching them, then finding more. Learning about this connection, this absolute and divine connection to all that is, and maybe ever was, in the universe.
And finally, facing and accepting death.
Had I thought all those lessons would be learned easily?
I guess I had.
I saw now that even the struggles, the hard times when I cursed and moaned and whined, had not been punishment. God hadn't been peering down from the heavens saying, Good, let her crawl over broken glass for a bit. That will teach her.
God was saying, Look, she's learning to love.
The struggle of climbing to the top of the mountain was as much my purpose as getting to the top of it.
I felt a lightness that I hadn't felt in years, maybe ever. For a moment I imagined I heard the angels sing, a celestial chorus of joy. I wondered how long, how long really, I had struggled to get this lesson right.
I didn't have to scramble up and down the ladder from despair to euphoria anymore, trying to convince myself that life was either painful and terrible or joyous and wonerful.
The simple truth was that life was both.
I hadn't come here to live happily ever after, although I now sensed I could. I had come here to learn love. That's what the lessons had been about.
Even those events I had written off as coincidence were an expression of divine love. Universal love. Love was an active, living force. I had always been there for me. All I needed to do was open my eyese and see and choos it.
It's not, I realized, that the lessons are about love. The lessons themselves are love. They are the journey to the heart.
I got up. And I let go of my balloon, watching it rail far up into the sky.
Understanding love didn't make the pain go away. Understanding love freed my heart.
It didn't mean I'd never feel pain again. An open heart feels pain and loss as well as love and joy. An open heart feels all it needs to feel. Otherwise, it closes again.
Thank you for my life, I whispered into the air.
I was surprised. At last I meant it.
