LOVE MATTERS!

Liz Gilbert was upfront and center in my email this morning, which is, I believe, the only way Liz Gilbert knows how to be! L.G. has a substack called Letters from Love, and she calls her followers Lovelets.

I started following her at the Kripalu event and changed to a paid subscription after the Toronto event. I have loved her since Eat, Pray, Love, but this is a new and improved Liz, with the bright and shiny turned up to a 12.

Her love letter today was so beautiful! And yet her focus on boundless love and her blinding shiny-ness tweaks me. My resistance to L.G. is linked to my wariness of endless love itself – it seems like a con game.

Oh sure (drawn out with three syllables) it’s just that easy. You look in the mirror and say “YOU ARE LOVED,” and then everything magically changes: your thighs are smooth, your skin is flawless, and you have boundless enthusiasm and energy.

Except that last one really is true, even in the midst of the skepticism.

For, in the time I embody the invitation of “you are loved“, I can’t help but feel it. My whole soul relaxes. And then I hear the news (involuntarily, because I’m on a news cleanse), or I get honked at by an impatient driver, or my kids live their lives and forget to call me, and BAM! I’m right back to, “See that WAS a con! Love is only for those who deserve it."

And that can’t be me, because I’m no longer saving teenagers and helping souls in pain full-time. I’m not in service, so I can’t be loved. 

My kids have fulfilled my dreams of becoming independent successful adults, so they don’t need me or have time to connect as much (btw, raising independent kids means that ultimately they are independent of YOU!!), so goes the kvetching.

And yet…I can call my kids or text them and tell them how love spills out of my heart in stars whenever I think of them. I can write a sweet note to my husband. I can look into the chocolate eyes of my furry shadow or pet his silky ears, and BAM! Love is back in charge!

Because the real truth, the bedrock of contentment, is that love is all around us and within us, all the time. Even in the honking and the loneliness, it’s right here in my heart, and my only job is to let it out!

XO
Terri