Since having first been given this assignment I received a very personal and deeply surprising blow from the person I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with. In the simplest of terms, my boyfriend broke up with me. Ironically enough, what I believe in is love and after this cosmic joke of sorts, I realized that I could easily give up and stop believing in love at all, but I feel that now is the time that I need to be believing more than ever. I don’t know exactly what it is yet, but I know that the universe is trying to teach me something. Maybe it is the endlessness of love and if I'm open and willing to letting it in, I can always have it.  

Love seems mysterious enough, and never have I really understood it to a great extent. I grew up believing that love is conditional and can only be obtained through certain behaviors. I remember being little and already feeling the weight of the world.

Parents and religious leaders gave out lists of things to do and not to do to have the approval and love of God. If the thing that I wasn’t supposed to do was done, great waves of guilt and shame came over me.  But I understand now as I have shaken off these beliefs that love is in everything good and flowing freely to any who will have it. It is a profound catalyst to my every great endeavor. It’s the reason I continue to wake up in the morning and do anything I do with passion. I learn these things through great teachers of the Universe, and I could spend all day teaching you these self-loving beliefs, but I only have so many words to work with.

I have experienced these feelings we call love in many different embodiments. When I had my first child I understood that I couldn’t possibly love an individual more than at that moment in time, and then I realized when I had to make the brave decision to let him go to another family to be raised that I had more love within myself than I could ever have conceivably imagined. And then, watching myself grow into ME. I was a destructed place of alcoholism, an eating disorder, and sexual abuse. I was a place that felt so uncomfortably unfamiliar, a place that at times seemed scary, a place of which had to mend and mend and mend till it finally felt alright. Then amazingly and painstakingly with time, patience and experience, like a caterpillar making the grand capitulation into butterfly, I came to who I am, flaws and all, and have begun to love myself.

And finally, love has taught me to let go. To let go of relationships, to let go of loved ones, to let go of fears, and misconceptions. Ray Bradbury says it best in Triumph Summer “Learning to let go should be learned before learning to get. Life should be touched, not strangled. You've got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it. It's like boats. You keep your motor on so you can steer with the current. And when you hear the sound of the waterfall coming nearer and nearer, tidy up the boat, put on your best tie and hat, and smoke a cigar right up till the moment you go over. That's a triumph.”