On finding love.
May 11, 2011 | 16 Comments
I’ll try to keep myself open up to you.
That’s a promise that I made to love.
Joni Mitchell
I read this quote today on someone’s Facebook page and a better instruction for love, I can’t find.
The foremost allegiance is to love itself and this is a pledge you can actually honor, as opposed to the pledge to always love another person, which as anyone who has been in a relationship for more than, say, two weeks, knows is not always possible. Sometimes you feel love and sometimes you don’t.
However, acting lovingly is always possible. By this, I don’t mean being sweet and nice all the time. I mean being yourself all the time. All. The. Time. And, even more interesting, inviting your beloved to be herself all the time, too.
Looking for a relationship that is based on how much you love each other is a tiny bit short sited. Looking for a relationship with someone who has a capacity for love—for openness, honesty, tenderness, humor, and an ongoing willingness to admit to her own confusion—is an ingenious maneuver.
Finding true love isn’t about finding someone who loves you, but someone who is willing to dedicate herself to love; who is open enough to feel what she feels, welcome what you feel, and then, together, hand-in-hand, shoulder-to-shoulder, watch it all go by.
For me, a meditation practice, which is the practice of opening, noticing, letting go, and starting over has been the ground, path, and fruition of my own dedication to love.
categorized in: dharma, meditation, open heart project
16 Comments
Hi Susan,
What a simple, elegant yet concise post.
It is easy to think that once we have the za-za-zoo feeling to then make the other person responsible for always making you feel that way, no exceptions allowed! It’s hard to try to depersonify love and to make love be about love itself. It’s also courageous to truly be yourself in the relationship and to take your physical self out of the love equation and just let the attributes that define what love is—honesty, tenderness, keeping an open heart–be the North Star that guides the relationship along its path.
Thank you Susan for continuing to do a level-set for us all as we go on about our human experience.
Love needs to be open…how else can we continue to love ourselves and others if it is closed. We change, those we love change, life changes and in order to keep love fresh and alive we need to be open to all the changes, all the possibilities. In ourselves and in others.
Thank you, Gina and Sherry, for adding your thoughts. Such a view of love makes all things possible.
Such a view of love makes love possible.
Exactly. That is what I have found.
Great thoughts! I felt I was ready for ‘love’ and opening myself up to it last year.. I told myself/the universe that I’m ready to love and be open to my path, wherever that may lead. My younger view of love was more immature but now I feel I have a deeper understanding about myself, although I’m still figuring this life thing out along the way. I found someone who is as sweetly open to love as I am, if not more, and is so encouraging. I don’t need him to love me. And that’s so refreshing. 🙂
I love this line:
“The foremost allegiance is to love itself and this is a pledge you can actually honor”.
Somehow, my husband and I sensed this when we put into our vows: “We enter this marriage as a crucible for the transforming power of love”, knowing that, if we let it, love itself would have it’s way with both of us.
Now I would say that part of the knack is choosing people to be around who make me *want* to return to love, over and over.
Hmmm? I am in a 35 year marriage and still find there is room for my heart to open, though it has only been recently that I have realized it since earnestly coming back to meditation. (I have “tinkered ” with it since 1974.) However NOW I recognize the times when there is a ‘disconnect’ and I react and act so much differently. I am so much more aware…but still have work to do.(lots) I was forgetting commitment to self, opening to self, loving self….I am fortunate to have a very (most times) patient ONE. It is nice to read other reflections on this topic.
I had to read this post twice – it’s deceptively simple. I think we often treat love like a switch – turning it on and off with passing whims. It’s much more demanding in many ways to keep the switch set to ‘on’. And realistic true love of self is in many ways the bedrock, I think.
Thank you all so much for your close reading of this piece!
Hey
Glad I found your writings. I needed that. Am going through hell cos of the so called “love” thingy. I think I am going to be okay. 🙂 Thanks
Agnes from Singapore
Susan, thank you so much for this! I felt my eyes opening and a warm bubble of Wow rising from inside me (nope, not a burp). Amazing insight and as others have said, deceptively simple. Opening to love as unfolding seems more possible and sustainable to me than defining it by the rush and roar.
Thank you so much for this elegant, simple and very timely post <3
Susan – this was one of the most touching posts I’ve read all year. Thank you.
I am so glad I was lucky enough to find your website. I found it while I was still single and it helped me recognise what I was expecting from love. I read it often, looking for answers, enlightment, definitions, a kick in my set ways of thinking, my blinded expectations. Thanks to you I am able to look at what love is with awareness. Thank you for all that.
Agnes, michael, Daniel, Zachary, and Nathalie, it is so nice to know you! Wishing you love in all things. I’m so, so, so thrilled if this piece touched you. Thanks for taking the time to say so. xo S