Loving Something Behind

Have you ever found a note on your desk or in a jacket pocket and for the "life of you," you can't recall why you wrote it down? So goes my note, sitting anonymously beside the computer keyboard. I looked over at the green sticky and its content of penned words: "Leaving Something Behind." My face scrunched up with a furrowed brow and mystically the word "leaving" morphed into "loving." I have no concrete idea how things like this arise, but I have learned to run with the thoughts handed down from—out there. The phrase "loving something behind," had a powerful ring to it, a positive, less melancholic chant to the idea of "leaving something behind." So here we go...

We will soon leave the Chinese Year of the Snake, and during the past year I have literally been shedding some skin. (You won't be seeing any pictures of that here!) Metaphorically, this past year has been in slithering rhythm with the anecdote of the snake. Molting away the old skin, leaving behind a former sense of self in stacked scales of sacred geometry. Each scale filled with experiences and life's lessons, and a profound vulnerability felt in that process. Letting go the people of "reasons and seasons," the layers of false faces rubbed off against the rough-rock journey—the path toward the new skin, the next layer expanded with a ready and willing brightness. The constraints of what no longer fits, happily left behind. Happily, yet not shed in the manner of running away from the past, or wiping the brow as if you dodged something. It is in the contrary context of embracing and loving all of the somethings, the somebodies and some former sense of self—left behind with love.

My dear and enlightened friend, Dave Towe, has these words tattooed on his arm: "In All Things Love." I thought of that quote this morning as I was writing, offering me additional confirmation that I was on the right side of my thoughts. If we applied the principle of love to everything in our lives, especially those experiences where we assign them with ill consequence, without fault or blame, we would simply love them for the value received. Any other way resides in the category of regret, resentment and shame. Those skins are hard to live with, and it is never too late to change "The Way to Love."

Is there something or someone you are holding onto other than in the light of love? I encourage you to take my idea into a contemplative moment, bring it into your heart and love that something behind. 

Note: "The Way to Love" the last meditations of Anthony De Mello—a transformative book given to me by long time friend Steve Alexander. It changed my point of perspective on my life as a mother, and what love is.