It's not foolish to ask for love.

Early this week I read, on referral, a book on prosperity consciousness and it was filled with a crazy amount of quotes, many of them out of the Old Testment of the Hebrew Bible, that said simply to ask for what you want.

Once upon a time - at Easter of '90 - I asked for what I needed/wanted (strength) and I got it. It came to me immediately. I just gave a sermon on grace and told that story and I called it grace.

So, on Wed I started saying, over and over: "I ask the divine rich substance of the universe to please, according to your will, send me a partner in love."

Curious. On Wed afternoon I picked up a grinder from a guy I used to have a crush on. I asked after his girlfriend and he told me that he was single now, that he'd broken it off after almost a year and that he was much relieved.

Interesting. I don't want to date the guy because he's a borderline alcoholic & gambler-every-night to boot and I'm not into dating addictions, but I would say it was kind of a heads up for me. I'm choosing, in other words, to attribute meaning to it, although I don't have to. Good meaning. A sign. A small promise back, from the universe.

Someone on my Twitter feed told me that it was foolish to ask - that it was simply up to me to discover the gifts I'd already been given. This guy's been married to his wife for 38+ years. Very easy for him to say that partner love is everywhere - he's had it all his life.

No, it's not foolish to ask.

But I want to know why "partner" love has not been in my life. I have the love of family and friends. But when I've fallen in love - and I fall in love a lot - it's nearly always been one-sided. For the two people I've actually had "relationships" with: I wasn't in love with Pat, but I was attracted to that attraction. Jose wanted a girlfriend-for-nooky on the side of his girlfriend-for-life and at the time I needed the attention. No other dates other than two with Eric in '90 and two with someone in '95. (I didn't date Pat and I didn't date Jose.)

Interesting that both actual relationships involved people who (a) wouldn't kiss and (b) had major abandonment issues. Interesting that of the last two men I fell in love with (one-sided), one was gay and the other hated women & needed to punish them.

My brother, until he found his current girlfriend (she had to push to get him to ask her out & they are perfect together), had the same issues: always dating people with massive abandonment issues.

What is this? Why do people not love me? Why only craptastic pairings?

Someone once said to me that it was easier for me to fall for someone who was unavailable, but then she would not explain why. (She wanted to remain the Sage.) I don't particularly understand my radar for unavailable people.

I don't have an answer, but I'm tired of it. There's some kind of victim thing built in there that says "well, no one loves me, no one's ever loved me." I have to let that go because it's making me tired. I'm tired of saying "well, he liked me but he couldn't do anything about it" - making excuses.

There's a profound loneliness that goes with it too. I'm better with someone, I'm pretty sure. Not because I want to lose myself: it's the extrovert part of me. I want someone I can explore ideas with, for example. And I need touch - so little of my life has had the touch of a lover.

So, instead of the helpless and hopeless approach, I simply decided to ask. Ask and ye shall receive. I am very clear on what I want, because I have learned a lot. I don't think I'm particularly picky - the ability to laugh and see joy in life and be on a seeker's journey is pretty much the length of the list (and he's got to be almost entirely sober).

I don't know how to read the red flags, though, even now. I've already got a crush on someone far away which is ridiculous because he's unavailable. Part of this is that I can live the relationship in my head. At least I can recognize it now - just as I can recognize the grinder guy as not being a great partner.

There's a lot of stuff from Dr. Google on being attracted to unavailable people. Profound insecurity, a lack of emotional vulnerability and all that. But I don't understand the link between insecurity and emotional vulnerability, nor do I understand the link between those two and finding an unavailable partner.

I suppose this is also why I've always built a wall around my body, to keep people away. I also asked this week that I could forgive and release everything I'm holding onto, holding tight to, that's no longer serving me. I remember that the less I held onto, the stronger I was - back in '99-'01, before I started to withdraw again on Pat's orders. It was either build the wall again or leave the relationship and I wasn't ready to do the latter so I built the wall again.

I like to think that with the body wall, no one will be attracted to me. But then I see people all the time, wall and all, with partners. So, it isn't really that. That's a convenient excuse.

Anyway.

Reorienting the brain's way of thought is valid. Billion-dollar industries are built around it. If I can stop focusing on "never finding love" and start focusing on "love is coming" and that it will happen, then I think that would be a good thing. The latter gives me hope. So much of my life is turning to bright shining gold that I want this area to be golden, too. I want real, mutual love between me and a partner. I ask for it here and now.

Nope, that's not foolish at all.

Walking from Cape Town to Cairo

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Today's UUS:E service is about water as a spiritual call. When the guest speaker wrote to us, she said that she'd founded an organization to raise money and awareness for clean water. She said that she was about to walk from Cape Town to Cairo (7,000 miles) for this water conservation cause.

I responded that yes, we'd be interested in having her speak, but that I would not want a lecture on water. Instead, I asked her to speak about what called her to go on this journey. I asked her to speak about would keep her going on mile #5708. I asked her to speak about what happened inside her to call her to put her body through that.

And she agreed to go with it and Sarah on my team took over from there. Should be good.

The Work of Love: Love Yourself.

An excerpt from a sermon I gave in February 2010.

I have a lively online life -- I communicate with friends and strangers living in this country and all over the world. I write about inspiration, I write about cooking and I write about love. Some folks wonder why I take the time to write about love in all of its bits and pieces.  It took me a long time to realize that love is an act, that love is a choice, that love doesn’t just sit there and look pretty -- whether you’re talking about romantic love, love within your family, your community or just within yourself. You have to pay attention to love or it grows dormant or inert or worse, it slips away. A few years ago, I made a commitment to watch love carefully and document what I see and what I feel.

When I reflect on my life, I see periods of dormancy and periods of wakefulness—winter times and spring times. Successfully moving from dormancy to wakefulness; successfully moving from winter to spring, has always required me to hear a call to love, and then to respond to that call, choosing to love again.

I grew up with lots of love in my home. My parents came from brutal, violent families and they both had made a decision to give my brother and me a different kind of home. There were times when we had money and times when we didn’t, but we always laughed and believed in each other. It wasn’t perfect but it was good.



Indeed, the four of us have a bond that’s hard for even our closest relatives to understand: We take action without words, we work seamlessly together in times of critical stress. My brother and I can start a fierce argument and resolve it in under a minute because we were taught to absolve the ego and choose love first and foremost. It has not always been this way, but we have worked at it.



My parents stressed the importance not just of knowledge, but to seek understanding with open eyes. Long before it became a prescription family activity, we’d all sit together on Sunday afternoons and talk to each other, analyzing things from what it takes to run a business to how deeply a single word can affect someone. 



I never knew a life without love, so without knowing that I did, I took it for granted. I had no idea that I had such a great capacity to love and to allow love into my life. I didn’t realize that love was about action and that love takes work and I certainly never realized that love was about choice.



About fifteen years ago I met someone that I thought loved me. I didn’t pay attention to the particulars, nor did I actually look into my heart to see if I was in love -- I figured that I had found someone that loved me and that was good. It was logical and that seemed to be enough. Every experience I’d had with my family led me to believe that this would be the same nourishing source of energy.



I grabbed the opportunity and went with it. I moved to Florida with my new significant other whose version of love, unfortunately, was to take the bright, shining jewel that I was and hide me away and control me to the point where I had no contact with friends and barely any contact with my family. I allowed this to happen without even realizing it. 

I tried to love my partner, but I had inadvertently found someone too damaged to know how to accept love at that time. I learned that there are people in the world who will not allow you to love them, no matter how hard you try. I learned that love doesn’t stay alive on its own; you have to work at it.



I remember thinking, about five and six and seven years into the relationship, that my heart felt like it was withering away, as if after having been dormant for so long that it was simply dying. After a while, I poured every ounce of love into my little ones, my animals. I chose to love them with everything I had. I adopted more and more and more cats because I had so much love to give. I let my heart go except for my little ones. They were all I had because I hadn’t learned yet that I could choose more. 



It took me ten years, but the moment to wake up finally came. I realized that this relationship of neglect had its purpose: I was being called to love myself. I needed to choose to love myself. I needed to take action in order to grow my heart and my life again. I looked at where I was and what had happened and saw that even if there had been love, it wasn’t there any longer. I saw that without action, there couldn’t be love.


The decision to leave brought with it incredible loss, because my partner retaliated, taking my little ones away. It was the only way to hurt me, and it worked. But I lived, one day at a time, some days still, like that, and my heart did grow back. And because I chose to love myself, my heart wasn’t dormant anymore - my life wasn’t out of service - and the love that I chose advanced me out of winter and into spring.  The seeds within me began to stir and then to bloom. And they are still blooming today.



I decided that when I enter into a romantic, loving relationship again, it will be a choice. It will be an action. Thoreau said that he meant to live deliberately, and so do I. That’s the work of love. I don’t take love for granted anymore, nor do I accept a passive role in its delivery.

Finding Spirituality in the Body

Often, the spiritual is seen as something only experienced through the head and the heart, but that leaves out the body entirely.

Putting together a panel of speakers for the UUS:E August 21st services: The Body/Spirit Connection. This service has been put together with the idea of giving insight to people who come that there can be a spiritual aspect of being involved in physical movement.

So, we wanted to ask our speakers - why does it matter? Why is it so important to you? What is it that drives you to consider that working with your body is, in its deepest essence, a form of worship or spirituality? What draws you to it? What does it give you in return? Do you find that any of the UU principles resonate with you on this body/spirit level?

And I told them that the worship planning committee thinks that their story can lead to people experiencing it, going home and considering the idea for their own lives.

I have lined up three speakers: a woman triathon athelete & marathon runner; a woman who bicycles through the Rockies on a regular basis and is into yoga and tai chi; and a man who has started his own business as a weight lifting and fitness training expert. We're going to incorporate yogic breathing exercises and a few mudras into the service, too, to create a body/spirit connection right while we're there.

What is Your Truth?

"I call that mind free which…calls no man master, which does not content itself with a passive or hereditary faith, which opens itself to light whencesoever it may come..." - Rev. William Ellery Channing

"What may appear as Truth to one person will often appear as untruth to another person. But that need not worry the seeker. Where there is honest effort, it will be realized that what appear to be different truths are like the countless and apparently different leaves of the same tree." – Ghandi

It requires a certain amount of freedom to be able to seek the truth. Unitarian Universalists affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning in our lives, and many non-UUs affirm and promote this as well.

But what is truth?

We start out believing as true the things we feel, taste, touch, see and hear. Then we discover tangible evidence that sensory truth is distinct and subject to biology. It’s a surprise when we learn that humans interpret colors differently. We’re amazed to find that cilantro reeks of stinkbugs and soap to some and offers a sharp lemony flavor to others.

Our circle of learning expands: we begin to see that experiences shape truths as well. Family, home, neighborhood, education and religious upbringing all contribute to how we filter truth in our lives.

As humans working to expand our lives, we seek to expand the filters of biology and experience. We are invited by the growth process to examine the validity of what we believe is true. We are asked to keep searching to stretch the boundaries of our beliefs as a part of our spiritual growth.

Consider these questions when you are thinking about truth:

What does truth mean to you?
Who gets to decide when something is true?
How do you seek the truth?
Has the truth ever changed for you?
How would you respond to someone who believes their religious creed is truth?