Ready For Love

Here are a couple more snapshots from our trip to CA and NYC last summer. Gosh I miss the US…the air, the people, the atmosphere, and that tan! I remember when there was a time when I didn't want to live there, because of all the bias attitudes and comments I'd listened to, and yet it became the one place I've felt the most at home. Obviously I've realised that home is where my people, family and friends are, but the past years I've had my closest people living across the globe and it seems like a distant fantasy to have everyone even in one country at the same time. Thank God for plains, trains, FaceTime, Skype and Whatsapp!

I wrote on one of my Music Mondays how loving yourself comes with a new, deeper love for others as well. We can only give from what we have. The past years I've slowly taken down the walls of "I won't let anyone hurt me again" and "No one will come that close to me" that I as a young woman vowed in the darkness of my pain and disappointment. Those vows made me immune to feeling the hurt and kept everyone around me at a distance. It was a safe place in the sense of protecting myself from possible sorrow, but it came with a cost. It kept me from experiencing the rawness and realness of love, the fulness of my existence. I was basically living only on the very surface in the ocean of life. Now that those forts have come down crumbling, I've been overwhelmed with the emotions it has brought. In our culture emotions are not of high value and rarely shown in public, but that hasn't stopped me. Letting myself feel the pain when faced with hurtful actions by people I love, hasn't made me weaker but healthier. I think all emotions find their way out one way or the other, but when they're suppressed it's usually detrimentally. Now I've made new vows. That I will cry as much as needed whenever I have the need for it. I will also fall deeper in love and let my closest people come frighteningly close. Yes, it means I'm positioned to being wounded by their mistakes, but for the first time I'm also positioned to receive the richness of unconditional love. No pain or sorrow can diminish it and no drug can replicate it. So here I am, open and undone. I am ready for love.

xxx