Feb 14, 2015 05:34
life is so fascinating. all of these synchronous events, realizing people are going through their own similar journeys too. detaching from the past, detaching from childhood sexual abuse, detaching from date rape as a young woman, detaching from people projecting their own insecurities, desires, and expectations on to others, detaching from feeling as if i have no home or safe space, detaching from intrusive thoughts of not being good enough or deserving of love and support. detaching from being afraid to ask for help.
“We can never go back. I know that now. We can go forward. We can find the love our hearts long for, but not until we let go grief about the love we lost long ago, when we were little and had no voice to speak the heart’s longing. All the years of my life I thought I was searching for love I found, retrospectively, to be years where I was simply trying to recover what had been lost, to return to the first home, to get back the rapture of first love. I was not really ready to love or be loved in the present. I was still mourning - clinging to the broken heart of girlhood, to broken connections. When that mourning ceased I was able to love again. I awakened from my trance state and was stunned to find the world I was living in, the world of the present, was no longer a world open to love. And I noticed that all around me I heard testimony that lovelessness had become the order of the day. I feel our nation’s turning away from love as intensely as I felt love’s abandonment in my girlhood. Turning away we risk moving into a wilderness of spirit so intense we may never find our way home again. I write of love to bear witness both to the danger in this movement, and to call for a return to love. Redeemed and restored, love returns us to the promise of everlasting life. When we love we can let our hearts speak.”
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from the “Preface” to bell hooks’ All About Love