Love

Love.  It is a noun.  It is a verb.  It is a complete sentence.  This holiday season, I am happy to share the planet with so many loving people.  I look around and see love all over the place.  I see love in the faces of friends, family, and strangers.  I see kind gestures.  I see connections.  I see people sharing simple pleasures with one another.  And I thank each and every one of you for your contributions of love to our world.  There is no wound that love cannot heal.  There is no dark place too deep that love cannot reach.  There is no reason ever to doubt love’s power to make everything and everyone right and whole.  I believe! May each of your hearts be open to receiving the greatest gift there ever has been, is, or will be – love.  And my love I share with you all!

Facing the Hills

Crisis points, inflection points, points of major change.  They aren’t bad, even though they may be uncomfortable.  Often, they are uncomfortable.  Think of starting a new habit with your body – a stretch, jogging, or climbing a hill.  Your body is going to speak to you and let you know that this is out of character, and difficult.  Your body is going to warn you to check it out and make sure you want to go ahead with it.  And if you evaluate it, and decide that it has value and merit, you go ahead with it.  Sometimes we don’t get a choice about whether a change is coming – like in times of crisis.  We have to “climb the hill” – one way or another.  But we always a get a choice about how we climb.  How we choose to speak and think about it are in our control.  We can tell the story as if this is the worst hill that ever came along, and it will ruin our lives.  Or we can tell the story as if this hill is hard and difficult and painful, but we know we’ll get through it in a meaningful way.  We know that we will learn something and grow.  We have that capacity as adults.  If no one modeled that for us, then we didn’t have that capacity as children.  But life is always presenting us with opportunities to grow up those young parts of ourselves.  The crisis points and hills are redundancies built in to allow us to learn this time, what we may not have been able to learn before.  Today, I will find hope in the opportunity to grow to my fullest potential by courageously facing the hills.