Lovely tulips

On Thursday, I walked into my office and found a box from ProFlowers.  It was lovely tulips.  The note said "Just because you deserve someone doing something nice for you for a change."   There was no signature.  There was no name.  A few years ago, I received an awesome anonymous gift of the Gilmore Girls box set.  It just showed up in my office one day.  I am a lucky girl!

I have no idea who the flowers are from.  I have asked everyone that I can imagine but they have all denied sending them.  They are glorious and bright and lovely.  They make my office very happy and feel full of love and life.  

  Thank you universe for giving me what I need.  Thank you universe for putting people in my life that love me and care for me. Whoever sent the flowers - I sincerely thank you.  The flowers came at the perfect time.  They meant a lot to me and they made me feel feel loved. 

The heart is resilient

The heart is a remarkably resilient thing.  This image speaks volumes to me about love, heart, healing, and being willing to continue to put your heart on the line regardless of how much pain comes along.  Our heart can heal and love is what helps us heal.  If we lock away our broken heart then we can't be healed through the love of others.  Not letting previous pain create such intense fear that it keeps you from moving forward is such a deep challenge.  Love leaves of vulnerable, its true, but it also makes us strong. 

Say what you need to say...

My BFF and I have had a long-term argument about John Mayer's song Say.   The question has always been do you "say what you need to say" when it might hurt someone else.  Or if it is coming from a place of anger or hurt.  I tend to err on the side of silence around saying what needs to be said.  I worry about my motives and my impact.  My BFF is more direct and clear about what he needs to say.  He declares that it isn't about saying what you want to say but about what needs to be said in the moment.

I have really been thinking about this concept a lot lately and think I am leaning more toward the side of my BFF.  I still think that I need to understand my motives for saying things that may cause pain or anxiety or have a negative impact but I think that sometimes it is inevitable.  Sometimes the fear that causes us not to ask for what we want, communicate our own pain, or express our own love locks us in a box and keeps us from forming real, deep, and meaningful connections with the people in our lives.

I have spent a lifetime building walls that protect my heart.  As I have gotten older I have start to allow people to chip down those walls a bit from the outside and I have started to chip at them from the inside.  Everytime I say what I need to say in a way that leaves me vulnerable, I take down one more brick from that wall.  Loving leaves us vulnerable and being vulnerable leaves us open to hurt.  That is the truth and it is scary.  It also requires me to trust myself more and to put trust in other people.  That is the biggest fear, right?  Not the fear that someone will hurt me but that I will have put my trust in the wrong person.  The fear that I will have been wrong and have made a bad decision.  That fear can keep me paralyzed forever.

Last night I made the decision to say what I need to say to people in my life.  I shared my feelings fully with someone last night and left my heart open.  It was absolutely frightening but once I did it, it was done and we talked, laughed and loved.  It was nice not having the truth sitting silently yet so loudly in my head.  I still am scared of the aftermath.  I'm scared of what happens next.  There are a couple of other conversations I need to have with people that I care deeply about because I want those friendships to thrive and I can't expect that to happen if I don't participate in the conversation.

One day at a time and facing one truth at a time. 

Love

Love.  There are a lot of things that I want to say about love right now and yet I am also not entirely sure what I want to say about love. 

I looked up love on Wikipedia.  (have you stopped laughing? )  I know that Wikipedia is not the best source of information in the world but in a pinch, it will do.  I just wanted to read what someone else said about love.  The very beginning of the entry is a definition.  And of course, with something like love, the definition isn't actually a real definition at all.  It is complicated and complex but was what I needed to read. 

In English, love refers to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from pleasure ("I loved that meal") to interpersonal attraction ("I love my partner"). "Love" may refer specifically to the passionate desire and intimacy of romantic love, to the sexual love of eros, to the emotional closeness of familial love, to the platonic love that defines friendship,or to the profound oneness or devotion of religious love, or to a concept of love that encompasses all of those feelings. This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, compared to other emotional states.

That's just it, isn't it.  Who the hell knows what love is?  How the hell do we know?  

I love lots of people.  I love my friends.  I love the staff I work with at SLTP.  I love my family. All of these "loves" are different.  There is more than enough room in my life and my heart for all of those kinds of love.  

What I am struggling with is the idea of romantic love?  Or that love that kind of fills you up? The love that you read about in books and stories.  Is that real love?  

I think in the thinking about the idea of "going for it", the concept of love overwhelms me.  I want to be in a relationship.  I want to have a partner.  I just don't have lots of good role models of healthy relationships.  I don't know if I trust the feelings.  Love may be the most terrifying cliff - the precipice that would require real courage to jump off of...  Is it always worth it?