Love Note to Myself, or Things One Remebers When It's Quiet Enough to Hear

Dear Me,

We’re never merely who we think we are. There’s always more to know, more of you to be discovered, more to love, more to be grateful for. The rest--stuff, expectations, blame and other ways of outsourcing authority--is a trap. It’s a bottomless, spiraling path to a pit. This downward path affords opportunity after opportunity to discover who we aren’t. We get so used to seeing what we've seen before, what we expect to see, that by the time we notice it, we’re so accustomed to the status quo that we assume that’s all there is--or will ever be. We walk down and down and down on this spiral and we forget that there’s an up to match our down. But how can we see an up when we don't even notice our down? It's easy to miss the down (and therefore the up) because the slope is often so gradual as to appear flat. But it isn’t. We may think we're waling forward in a straight line, but we're not. Einstein even proved that this whole timespace thing is as curvaceous as a stalking BBW sub in a corset & a short skirt. All we see is what we’re used to, what we expect to see.

But we can remember. We can remember there’s an up. It’s scarier only because it lacks that woobiness of comfort, familiarity. It really isn’t any more scary than finding the down, though the up is, in my opinion, certainly no less pleasant than the down.

Realize your downward walking so that you can look up. Plato was just telling you about the cave; he didn’t mean for you to stay in it this long.

Be grateful for everything. It isn’t easy, but it can be done. Gratitude makes a big difference in your quality of life, especially when it’s tricky; to be able to weed your life so finely that you discover a tiny jasmine blossom among the blackberries, trying to thrive, takes some doing. It requires stamina, effort and grace to truly experience gratitude when it all feels and looks like fertilizer. Keep practicing. You get better at it with practice.

The world is subject to change – dramatastically – without notice. We can’t know. What we can know is what’s inside us; that’s ours to control.

Go back and get the pieces of yourself that you’ve left behind in chasms of resentment, bungholes of fear and concrete galoshes of hate. Unbind yourself from those Marleyan chains, and bring yourself fully present to this moment, right now (flogging-giving or receiving- is great for practicing this, by the way). You won’t believe how much extra vitality you’ll have to work with, to apply to your desires when you call the abandoned pieces of yourself into the present moment!

Love and gratitude have in common that they can both be tough to see in a messy situation. But they are always there, if one insists on looking for them til they’re found. Find something to love about everything. Easy when things are pleasant (which is why pleasure is such an excellent ground for discovering how easy it is to love something if your perspective is just so); hard when things are icky. But if you practice looking for things to love and get used to that lovin' feelin', why, then, you’ll be ready to notice it elsewhere. Hone yourself on love. Everything else breaks.

Ever yours,
Me