Naming it ALL love

I’m sitting in the living room of our home. It’s a little past noon. Kate (my daughter) is at school and Andrew is in the next room writing some emails. He just received some very disappointing news and we’re all reeling a bit. Without going into great detail, we believed he was going to begin a whole new line of work in one week’s time, but at the eleventh hour—most unexpectedly-- was not accepted into the department.

I’m writing about this because I can feel the difference in me from just 9 months ago. We are moving with and through the feeling of this-- but without panic or the desire to fix it. I am holding him with a lot of love and I am holding the whole situation with a lot of trust.

There was a kind of insistence in my HELLO LOVE in the first couple of years. I almost don’t know how to describe it. There was somehow an implied MUST. We MUST greet one another this way if we want to affect a change, if we want to make a difference. There was a kind of force instead of a ‘feeling into’. Feeling into this, I see love working in even the most difficult and challenging situations. I begin to feel my worst moods as love seeking expression. I feel my worst disappointments as love attempting to articulate itself.

In this very moment of Andrew’s great disappointment, I’m feeling into the texture of Hello Love. Hello grace. Hello beauty disguised as obstacle.

I guess I’m feeling the textures of things so much more deeply these days. What is the texture of THIS love? And feeling the texture is an action in itself. There is no ‘doing’ necessary. There is no fixing. There is only wonder, awe, perspective, presence.

I am present with Andrew in this unexpected unfolding story of love that LOOKS like rejection or LOOKS like he is being thwarted. And we don’t have to name it anything. I just like the experiment of naming it ALL unfolding LOVE.