Be Love, Beloved
I wanna be honest, when I started to write a piece on Love for Advent, I thought it would be easy. It wasn’t. I didn’t realize how hard it is right now, for me, to see the love in the world.
There’s a lot going on; it seems the message of sorrow and danger and devastation lingers longer within us. An old survival mechanism, no doubt.
So what do I do? I call out to the universe for help. I ask the ancestors, the collective, God, the powers that may be, whoever is out there listening to help. To show me. And they did.
I share the messages that came to me now, words of others. I hope you do not mind, but in reality, any words that I share are the words of others, that have been stitched into me, or tacked on, or woven in. We are all what we choose, and sometimes don’t choose, to be from those around us.
Misery might love company, but so does joy. And joy throws much better parties. From a post shared by our Marti Bradshaw, originally from Donna Swartwout in The Laughing Christian.
When you can't put your prayers into words, God hears the heart. Posted by my friend Darrell Allen.
Christ may dwell in your hearts by faith. Ephesians 3:17. From one of Samuel John’s beautiful daily messages.
You will change the world just by being a warm, kindhearted human being. A quote on a picture sent to me by my sister, Katelyn, posted by Dete Meserve.
Every day, somewhere in the world, the Nativity Scene is alive. Posted by my mother, Andora, paired with this photo, which brought me some sadness:
Your thoughts are not who you are. Be cautious of how much power you give them. Posted by my dear friend Hollace.
You are controlled by the one who makes you angry. Lao Tzu. Shared on a daily meditation with Master Ko, in which he talked about how we are not our anger (which I still have issues with, because I feel like we need to feel it to let it go, but I digress).
Sometimes I am wrong. A message I got from misquoting someone, and then being corrected. And then standing corrected.
Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives that they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible. By Katherine May in Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, published in 2020. Also posted by my mother.
93 Percent Stardust
After Carl Sagan, who gave me hope as a child.
We have calcium in our bones, iron in our veins, carbon in our souls, and nitrogen in our brains.
93 percent stardust,
with souls made of flames, we are all just stars
that have people names.
By Nikita Gill. Reposted by poet and writer, Michael Cunliffe.
Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. Rumi. Posted by our own Erica Saunders.
So what I am getting from this? With the respect that you may get something completely different and the understanding that I might be wrong, I understand we are light just by being ourselves. If you are sad, that is normal and human. You are still light and therefore love. If you are depressed or scared or tired or run down by this capitalist society, that is normal and human, especially for this time of year.
If you are in any of these spaces, let it be. Feel it and let it go. Give yourself oxygen and feed your own flame, but do not doubt, even in these spaces, your ability to be a light in the world. Do not doubt your ability to be a love and be loved. For even Eeyore made a lovely chum, and a star does not have to try or think about being light to do so.
Let us simply be. And be light. And be love. And be loved. Beloved.
