Love | Open Space Practice, (AKA: A Thousand Shades of Gray)

If you look for love, open your eyes and heart and actively seek it out, cultivate your awareness of it, practice being mindful of it, you will begin to see it everywhere, in everything, in everyone, in every moment.

If you look for love, wish for it and dream of it, you will begin to notice it showing up in every moment to meet you where you are. It will throw its arms open wide and embrace you. It will warm every corner of your house, of your heart, bringing comfort and confidence to every minute.

If you look for love, no matter how long it has been, or how good you’ve gotten at rejecting and resisting it, you will find it, or rather, it will find you.

If you let it, open yourself to it, it will fill you up, every crack and corner, all the way from the bottoms of your feet to the tips of your fingers and up to the top of your head, all the way to every edge and into every space, pushing aside all the yuck and the broken and the mess, burning through all the should and have to and not enough, filling you full and shining out through your glowing, soft, alive animal body, turning you into a beacon of itself, a light of love for those others who are looking.

from Jamie’s post

What is your heart’s wish?

With every beat my heart wishes to experience and manifest more love, but besides more love, its wish is: to write a book, many books, to string words together like prayer flags or mala beads, to live the life of a writer, quiet and solitude and reading and long walks and up early and dogs at my side or curled up at my feet, and thinking and dreaming and imagining, and having long conversations about how and why, and love, love, love, and the tenderhearted wise sadness of being present and of knowing how love goes and how things are and how this works, and grief and letting go and surrender, and friendship, and moving not the way fear makes me move but the way love makes me move, and allowing my “soft animal body to love what it loves,” and meditation and rumination and contemplation, step by step and word by word, being still and listening with my whole heart, being curious and gentle, saying only what is true and helpful and kind, being fearless in that way that gives a gift of the same to others so that they too can notice and manifest their basic goodness, to wholeheartedly live a full life and write about it…this is my heart’s wish.

My heart also wishes for flight, and no matter how often or carefully I explain the laws of physics and the impossibility of a wingless lump of muscle and blood floating on the air, it insists and continues to dream that it will one day wake with wings and fly away. It says that hope is not the thing with feathers at all, love is, and that its capacity for love will be the magic that makes it soar, that unhinges it from this mortal, ground-bound body. And I must admit, kind and gentle reader, sometimes I get caught up in the fire of its faith and find myself almost believing it.