The Power and Transformation of Opening to Love

"The one who came farthest to my lodge, through deepest snows and most dismal tempests, was a poet. A farmer, a hunter, a soldier, a reporter, even a philosopher, may be daunted; but nothing can deter a poet, for he is actuated by pure love." -- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

I wrote in my last post ("Recovering What Has Been Lost") how, through a combination of external events but mostly through my own mistakes in setting goals and trying to exert too much control over the way my life was going, I lost much of my love for myself.  In doing so, I closed myself off to my own inner self and voice as well as to others and to the natural world.  As I've written before, I firmly believe that lack of connections to our true selves and to nature can lead to feelings of loneliness and alienation, and so it was no wonder that during this time I frequently suffered from painful feelings of loneliness, depression, isolation, and self-doubt.

The only voices I could hear were the ones in my head that told me I was a failure, I was a disappointment, I was pathetic, and I was incapable of ever finding anyone who would love me.  If I did not love myself, how could anyone else do so?  I tried to listen to nature, to the voices of the trees, grasses, and hills that surrounded me, but it became more and more difficult to hear those voices.  Without knowing it, I had built ever thicker, higher, and stronger walls around my inmost self, and I was losing that ability to listen and to hear.

But, when I was least expecting it, things began to change, so slowly at first that I hardly knew what was happening.  First of all, about a year and a half ago, I began to become friends with a person whom I had met in one of my classes.  It took me the longest time to actually accept what was happening: to accept that this person actually wanted to be my friend, actually cared about me, actually wanted to talk to me, to learn more about me, and to spend time with me outside of school.  I had come to the point where it seemed impossible that anyone would ever want to do those things, and now someone did.  I felt a great joy at this, yet at the same time I became very afraid to reach out to my friend in the same way that he was reaching out to me.  I even found myself repeatedly engaging in a sort of self-sabotage - saying things to my friend to cause strife, quarrelling over things that ought never to have been quarrelled over - as though if I did those things then I could force my friend to draw away and prove to myself that I really was as unlovable as I had thought and that no one would ever want to be my friend.  I felt bad for saying those things, yet there was so little communication between the different parts of my being that I felt powerless to stop, and I hated myself for being unable to stop.

Then last fall I found a quote on someone's blog, and it stuck with me.  The quote was from Rumi, and it went: "Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."  These words stayed with me through that fall and winter of my last semester at university, and the more I turned them around in my mind, the more I realized their truth for me.  I had built barriers and walls within myself, I had ceased to listen to my true self and to nature, I was denying love for myself and for others as well as love from others, and I felt numb inside.  But the very recognition that the walls were there meant that they were already beginning to erode.

As the new year arrived, I did something that I hadn't done before: I chose a word of the year rather than setting any specific goals or resolutions.  The word I chose was "open", since it represented much that I wanted in my life: I wanted myself to be open to change and to love, to be open-hearted and open-minded, to open the doors that I had closed and to break down the walls that I had built.  I wasn't sure where this word would take me, but then my friend asked me that question that I wrote of in my last post: what had I left behind in my past that I now needed?  I realized right away that part of the answer was that I had lost my ability to be open, closing myself off from my true self and from the world, but the complete answer did not come to me until later.  When it did - after a couple months of pondering the question in the back of my mind - it was like an epiphany.  What I had lost was my love for myself.

~~~

I feel open these days, spacious, drifting light on the wind.  At times, I feel filled with love for this world and for those individuals within it who are close to me.  I am also learning again to love myself.  "I am worthy of love," I tell myself, "And I love you.  I truly do."  I love you.  I truly do.  At other times, I feel a deep anger and I want to hit things, break things, scream, or cry.  There are still some walls that need to come down.  I am trying to be patient, gentle, kind, and loving with myself.  It is hard.  Sometimes, it is painful.  When the dikes break and the flood waters come raging in, is that a painless event?  I don't think so.  But now, instead of closing it off and denying it as I have so many times before, I am trying to face that pain with love.

There are doubts and fears that remain.  That is okay.  I am not perfect.  I am not expecting any miracles, or an overnight transformation.  The important thing is to acknowledge those doubts and fears, look them in the face, and even learn from them.  My greatest fear is that I have lost or irreparably harmed a friendship that is more dear to me than almost anything else.  But I cannot reverse the past, or take back those words that I said and wrote.  All I can do is offer my apologies, my love, and make amends in whatever way that I can.

At times, I am fearful, uncertain, doubtful, angry, bitter, cynical, depressed, despairing, sad, unhappy, and apathetic.  I am only human after all.  But even when I am those things, I try to find that spark of love, hope, and faith within me.  And then at other times I find myself filled with love and, like Thoreau's poet in the quote at the beginning of this post, daunted by nothing.

Like what you read?  Please visit my new blog: At the Edge of the Ordinary.