There is love here.
The couple poses for engagement photos in front of a Saturday beach sunset. The Gulf waters shimmer and reflect the sky’s raving bursts of tangerine, electric pink, and wistful blue. The photographer snaps some quick photos, then dashes over to the eager bride-to-be to review the shots. I glance at the groom, and see a man in love. He exudes this thoughtful tenderness, a genuine and gentle adoration.
I know this look, and well enough to recognize the sincerity in it.
I’ve received that gifting gaze and have seen other couples share it when they move, often without any motion or gesture, into their own private world of their own unspoken and breath-deepening understanding.
Yet, I am slightly surprised and sweetly astonished to be a witness once again to it. It’s an intimate gaze, one I’ve just happened to catch, like this sunset, and I respectfully shift my attention to the glistening dance of the waves.
There is love here, too.
A young mother cradles her baby close to her chest as she deliberately and delicately places bare chubby baby toes into the giving mounds of sand. The father kneels down nearby and angles his camera up. The camera’s clicks send startling green flashes across the beach, and for a moment, my Dad wonders if it’s lightning, or the famous green light that brilliantly blinks on the horizon right as the sun drops into the sea. I like how the sun delivers an encore.
I watch the father taking photos of his young family and I clearly hear in a wise voice that is my own when I am calm that these beach moments are important. These photos will be framed, and I remember the Gulf photos of me as a toddler and others with my two sisters, all of us shockingly blonde little seagulls and in matching bathing suits, but like bridesmaids we sport different styles. These photos decorate my parents’ house, my childhood home, and capture moments of sun-kissed happiness.
There is love here.
This sheep-like doodle pup is not like the humans who are training camera lens and eyes to the sun’s magnificent descent. Rather, the pup is facing the wooden staircase leading from a palm tree laden park to the beach. Each person, each sunset seeker, is the canine’s true love. He applauds each arrival with his tail. He’s completely enthralled by each person passing by, and lifts his face to retrieve a pat or a smile he’s inspired. And when the sun does set, his owner, a woman dressed in all white, turns to her side and gives his snout a kiss.
There is love here.
Right here.
Whenever I need the reminder, I simply need to blink, step out of my busy mind, and refocus my gaze.
This morning, for the first time in a decade, the motivating thought to get out of bed was not coffee (I’ve had other exciting reasons to rise and shine and typically coffee is always on that alluring list). It was the chance to experience the early rays of Floridan sunlight.
I’m beginning to reprioritize my life — sunrises, sunsets, star-gazing, floating in the ocean, actually noticing the elegant architecture of trees.
While there’s been a gradual and sustained change of appreciating present-enlivened beauty, I’m also finding myself more immersed in the thorny thicket of thought.
I brew in darker thoughts, in my own concerns that stretch to include the entire globe and disappear into mental debates between me and an invisible devil’s advocate. And then, there’s an abrupt awakening — only crumbs remain of my breakfast and I can’t recall tasting it. I’ve forgotten if I’ve shampooed my hair and wonder if I need to re-lather. I’m resting on the currents of the salt water and realize my mind’s chatter has swallowed the peacefulness that is here — in the stretch of blue sky, in the effortless and chilled-out flight of the nearby pelican.
A life-affirming awareness switches on the light, like a mother who turns on a lamp for her child who doesn’t realize she’s been reading in the dark. Our thoughts can take us into convincing thought-systems that trick us out of experiencing our lives.
Noticing with compassion is half the work.
I allow the beauty of the world to do the rest, and by doing I mean move me, or perhaps it’s more of a returning, back into embodied being.
I get emails from nonprofit organizations, from businesses preaching to me that the world has turned upside down, and therefore, I should be doing this or that, or thinking this way, or disliking this group of people, or treating my body this way … and I think of the perfect orchestration that is nature, that is life on this planet (mycelium to seeds to tidal rhythms to moon cycles) and how our bodies reflect this perfect orchestration because our bodies are nature.
The world is not crazy. Our world is not crazy.
Unconscious people conduct and create the crazy.
Unconscious people have forgotten their innate godliness, their innate goodness, their interconnectedness with life, which means they are blind to the innate goodness in others, to the intelligent flow that is life, and in fact, may seek to destroy it because they’ve been deceived in believing it is lost within them and therefore, can’t stand to see that light on in others. This is a thought-system of fear and separation, and when people are in fear, they strive to control.
I see this within me, too. It’s there. The desire to be right so I can’t be guilty of being wrong. This defensiveness of my opinions because I am scared, and I’m scared because I’ve falsely identified myself with my opinions, and I am not my opinions, that is not my Truth, and when I forget who I am, I feel vulnerable to attack, but when I re-remember that I am life, and that vibrancy of life wishes to express itself through me (and you), I remember and experience that affirming flow of breath that returns me to the embraced belonging of interconnectedness.
The sun is setting on the old paradigm.
We are being called to awaken to witness the transition and be vigilant in keeping our hearts open to one another, to keep seeing the love that is here, and we can witness the love and know that we are that love.
We are all inwardly journeying and reflecting that journey outwardly.
The concerns I have about the world, the opinions I cling onto oh-so-tightly - all loosen when I allow myself to be in the world, when the world rivers into my vision and my thoughts river out.
The couple posing for their engagement photos, the young family on the beach, the woman dressed in white snuggled up to her loyal, affable dog … their presence is a present.
As the sun sets, I think about the stories and textures of this day — there have been births, deaths, weddings, mundane routines and momentous celebrations, inner revelations and forgiveness extended and bestowed, quests for truth and intentional deceptions, first kisses and heartbreaks, and around and around we go. Everyone I see is a micro-universe of longings, fears, joys, and stories they could possibly find words for and deep stories they carry that are beyond language. The stories that can only be told in the language of sunsets and the arrival of stars.
There is love here.
There is love here because you are here.
Soften your gaze enough until you can truly see.