Love: Lost and Found

At age 18, what usually marks the time to spread one's wings and fly free from the family tree, I fell fast and hard from the nest instead. My wings unprepared and entangled with the twigs and twine of the nest builders, only to become paired up with another fledgling.

I've often thought that my life as a budding adult, through what is deemed as the 'identity phase' [roughly18-25] was put on pause. Over the years, I've looked inside from the mature responsible woman's exterior and could still see and feel the 18 year old in me waiting for the fun, adventures and reckless abandon to begin. Hold please! The path of individual growth merged with the care and responsibility of other fledgling beings. Forty years down the road I still have a sense of her and through later-in-life experiences she has emerged ethereally a beautiful bird soaring at unimagined heights with layered depths of perception.

I've listened with big attentive ears to the stories of youth through the breathed memories of others. I can't say I ever really feel sad or a loss around my chosen path versus the path of [natural order]. It's as if I already knew it, through a past life perhaps, and so I walked before I crawled into adulthood, I mothered on the edge of transition between child and adult. Many of my ideals and dreams stowed away for another time. That time is now.

The recent passing of my 58th birthday has me reflecting on my wants and desires, the list of which has been tempered with time. Shortened to nothing that money can buy. A sincere soulful attempt to "do unto others" from the book I've never read and to love and honor myself. To understand and live the rest of this life knowing that, just as I am—I am enough. To no longer rely and look for praise and love outside of myself, for that path is entwined with the opposite effect that can clip our own wings of wonder. Everything else that arrives at this point is, as they say, icing on the cake.

I've arrived at this much spoken about [unaccepted] place of self love. Not withstanding going through some very low, alone and dark places. Those places might just be prerequisites and damn hard lessons in the cirriculum of life. (Insert smiley face here.)

I wish everyone could feel this kind of love. It is freedom, it is peace, it is love. It's our birthright.