Love. Let me tell you what love is. But first, let me tell you what it isn't.
It is not the depictions you see on social media. It is not #relationshipgoals. It is not extravagant gifts of oversized teddy bears or chocolates. It is not found inside expensive bags from high end stores. Nor is it written in the tip line of fancy restaurant dates. Yes, these can be expressions of love, but in itself, love is not encompassed in these things.
Love, is when you are there at your worst. Not in the "sweatpants and no makeup days." It is more than that. It is when you are overcome with the grief of this world and you are at a point of such exhaustion that even waking up in the morning is a task you can no longer seem to do alone, and he is there. When you are offering up nothing, and yet he is there to pick up the pieces and hold you when hope seems lost. When you are so frustrated for lack of control over situations beyond your reach, that your words are harsh and unkind and yet he is there, because your pain is his to bear because he chooses to make it his. If you want to know if someone truly loves you, let him see you when you are distraught and see how he reacts. When someone loves you, they will not be able to leave you alone in your darkest places. His love covers your harshness. It moves him to forgive your irrational outbursts. His love becomes a salve to your bleeding heart.
I am sorry to say that it took the nosedive decline of my father's health and my overwhelming sense of impunity over the circumstances surrounding it for me to see this. For me to realize that love, while it makes us feel elated and euphoric, is not simply that 'lovey-dovey' infatuation that so many demand and when its gone grow tiresome and move on to the next. Love is seeing the person who holds your heart, stricken with grief to the point that their light dims to nothing more than a flicker, darkening the face that you once regarded with such beauty and still being moved to pull them in to your arms. Love goes beyond the physical, beyond the advantages a person has to offer another, and inspires you to rise up and be the rock and sanctuary that your sweetheart may desperately need, but may not be able to express or are too consumed to even realize ask for.
In the past few weeks, I have learned this lesson in a most personal way. I have gotten to the point where I wake up and don't even recognize the person in the mirror for the stress I am trying to cope with. If it weren't for him, I can honestly say I doubt I'd have been able to pull myself back together. That sacrificial love offering from him being there each day, good or bad, that is what turns young love into the couple that is celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary and still looks at each other the way a man does on his first date with the girl of his dreams.
Love is built on hardships and if it is real love, it withstands the heat of the fire, coming out stronger than before.
Friday, October 23, 2015
Monday, October 5, 2015
Pentagrams & Rituals
So this week Eric & I encountered a new bump in the road..or so to speak. We knew going into this relationship that our religious backgrounds, (him being raised in a strict Catholic home, as I mentioned, & me having been raised by Christian pastors) are no longer the paths or belief systems we believed in. And while I am still up in the air on my beliefs, he, however, is a practicing Pagan. We knew this from the beginning, so that's no surprise and not a problem for either of us, unlike in some relationships when it comes to religious beliefs.
Now before anyone starts filling their head with scenes from various halloween movies of demons and witches and bloody sacrifices, understand that is NOT what Paganism is. Unfortuneatly I am not familiar enough with it to expand (yet), but that does lead me to the point of today's topic. And that, my friends is learning, not only to tolerate and respect your partners religious beliefs, but also to make an effort to understand it for yourself. Or at least that is what I am going to do.
So, I took a little trip to New Moon (this new age store here in kalamazoo, that we both love) and picked up a book entitled "Paganism: An Introduction to Earth-Centered Religions."
I'll let you know how it goes and my thoughts on the tradition (as it is called by those who follow these sets of beliefs) but for now, as part of my "What is Love?" blog, my personal lesson is that of acceptance, tolerance, understanding, and respect for the man I love & what he believes. I feel that this will not only be beneficial for our relationship, but also for my to help me gain the knowledge I need to decide what it is that I believe in as well.
**This post is by no means encouraging you to convert religions for another person. Stick to what you believe and know why you believe what you believe. But understanding and being able to discuss what you believe with another person is a layer of intimacy a lot of couples (at least those my age & that I know) completely omit those types of conversations & it effects the breadth of intimacy that their relationship has.
Now before anyone starts filling their head with scenes from various halloween movies of demons and witches and bloody sacrifices, understand that is NOT what Paganism is. Unfortuneatly I am not familiar enough with it to expand (yet), but that does lead me to the point of today's topic. And that, my friends is learning, not only to tolerate and respect your partners religious beliefs, but also to make an effort to understand it for yourself. Or at least that is what I am going to do.
So, I took a little trip to New Moon (this new age store here in kalamazoo, that we both love) and picked up a book entitled "Paganism: An Introduction to Earth-Centered Religions."
I'll let you know how it goes and my thoughts on the tradition (as it is called by those who follow these sets of beliefs) but for now, as part of my "What is Love?" blog, my personal lesson is that of acceptance, tolerance, understanding, and respect for the man I love & what he believes. I feel that this will not only be beneficial for our relationship, but also for my to help me gain the knowledge I need to decide what it is that I believe in as well.
**This post is by no means encouraging you to convert religions for another person. Stick to what you believe and know why you believe what you believe. But understanding and being able to discuss what you believe with another person is a layer of intimacy a lot of couples (at least those my age & that I know) completely omit those types of conversations & it effects the breadth of intimacy that their relationship has.
Monday, September 28, 2015
Class Thoughts
So far I'm really digging this class. I was worried that a class this long, I'd end up daydreaming, but it's actually really easy to follow because of all the change ups (i.e.. groups, discussion, individual writing.) It works. My only confusion this far is making sure I am not missing anything. It would be cool to have a list of the all the cumulated assignments somewhere (if they are already posted all together, PLEASE leave a comment as to where. Haha, I would be oh, so grateful.) Anyway, so far, I really like it. Only downside is that I tend to get pretty hungry around 11, but breaks aren't long enough to really go get anything but vending machine junk :/ bleh, maybe I'll start packing snacks...hmm..
Anyway, that's all for today.
As for the question of my last post, (looking into what love really means) I am still gathering data..ahem.. I start off googling "love quotes" & I end up getting lost in a bunch of new books that I want to read, so...more on that later!
Meg
Anyway, that's all for today.
As for the question of my last post, (looking into what love really means) I am still gathering data..ahem.. I start off googling "love quotes" & I end up getting lost in a bunch of new books that I want to read, so...more on that later!
Meg
Thursday, September 24, 2015
What is love?
So after much thought & deliberation...(dun. dun. DUNNN!) I have come up with my topic for this blog. It intertwines with my "influential person" & I hate to be cliche' but I am choosing someone who influences my life on a day to day basis & that is my lovely boyfriend, Eric. After my last post (the one that began with the Ted Talks post,) it got me and him talking about our individual definitions of what love meant to each of us. His response honestly through me for a loop.
Don't get me wrong here, he and I have a pretty stellar relationship & we are aware that we each have our own love languages (more on this in another post) and learning to speak and communicate our love in a way that the other person understands. (Think a native Italian speaking man in a relationship with a native French speaking woman, both trying to learn the others native tongue in order to communicate effectively with one another, & that is the metaphor behind learning one another's love languages.) Well we have been making an effort to do this but I never once thought we'd have such different ideas about what love is. To understand this, and understand this post, you'll need a little back story.
I did not have a conventional upbringing whatsoever. I am the product of a one night stand between a 16 year old girl & a 22 year old man. Angela (my birth mother) is the product of a broken home where her own mother (what would be my grandmother) kicked her and her two younger brothers out onto the streets when she was just the tender age of 13, because my biological grandmother's boyfriend, at the time, did not like children. To no surprise, my young mother found herself pregnant again by the age of 19 and also became heavily addicted to drugs. So much so, that when I was four years old, my mother locked me and my four month old brother in a room inside our one bedroom trailer while she went out on a three day drug binge. Take that all in for a moment.. an infant and a preschooler were locked away, alone in a room for days on end by their own mother because of addiction.
This was my example of what love was. Not a very great one, huh? Well before we get too depressed here, he and I were found and taken away by police & social services, to eventually be placed in a home with a couple who had tried for 15 years to have children but could not. It was in this home that my adoptive mother, April, showed me, taught me, and filled me with what real love is. She taught me about forgiveness and how to practice it, even when it came to forgiving my birth mother for abandoning us. She taught me how to overcome the pain of the various types of abuse I had experienced at the hands of my birth mother, and her many boyfriends.
I believed that because my own mother chose drugs over me, and never showed up for visitations to get her rights back, that for whatever reason, I wasn't worth loving. I didn't deserve love. I was unplanned, unwanted, and abandoned, all before I even learned how to read. Those kinds of damages can and did destroy my psyche and made me feel like I had to work harder, or be better, or -you fill in the blanks- to be deserving of love. But out of the ashes and rubble, my new mother built me up, piece by piece, teaching me how to cope and overcome these deeply cut wounds. Now I'm 22 and I am finding that the issues I thought I had overcome, still impact me in my everyday life and the ripples touch my relationships to this day. I have a tendency to try to earn the love in my life and when I don't see the results I feel I've worked for, I begin to look to myself to find out what I did wrong. You see, the relationship between mother and child is supposed to be the first relationship where you are exposed unconditional love and when that foundation is broken, when that first, most important relationship is abandoned by the mother, it is the child that is damaged. And greatly so. Fortunately for me, my new mother filled me with so much love that I am now able to look back on my birth mother with sympathy, understanding, forgiveness, and yes, love. Eric, well he has a different story altogether.
He was born the second, and middle child, of two very traditional Italian and Polish devout Catholics. When he was 16, and decided that Catholicism wasn't the religion he believed in there was strife. But even before this, (which he revealed to me in this intimate conversation,) his father never once told him that he was loved until he was 20 years old. "I love you" wasn't said in his home by the men in the family. (He has 2 brothers, no sisters.) And because of this his idea of love is very different than my own. He said to me that family members were met with a firm handshake, whereas in my family, love was overflowing. (Not to say my new family was perfect, but our parents adopted four children from broken, drug-riddled families where the concept of love was not & had to do some serious damage control, as I like to call it. Our mother had a gift for teaching and because of it we grew up knowing that love from her was unconditional and nothing we did or said would ever change that. His family, (which seemed like a "white picket fence" life I'd only ever imagined,) turned out to have deeply scarring issues too. He wasn't taught about love the way that I was. Love to him, was a nice idea, but it wasn't the root of all good things. It was viewed more like the potatoes and less like the steak of a meal; its a nice side dish, but he grew accustomed to not feel a need for love, something which he has never truly experienced. (Personally, I believe his parents and family do love him, but back to the love languages, I feel that there was a certain miscommunication there and he grew up feeling unloved and unwanted, much like I did, but without the constant reassurance that he was, in fact, deeply loved.
Which brings us to our current relationship.. He and I set up a challenge together. He would get out of his comfort zone and try to understand and apply my ideas of what love is to our own relationship in order to, not only help us grow together, but also to test his idea that love is meaningless and is conditional. So, I give you my new and improved personal blog about digging into what love really is. I plan to write daily (or as much as possible) with examples, and excerpts, and anecdotes from all over (including my own parents, who are marriage counselors and have been together for 32 years now) about what love is.
Responses are welcome and personal ideas about what love has meant to you would be greatly appreciated!
Don't get me wrong here, he and I have a pretty stellar relationship & we are aware that we each have our own love languages (more on this in another post) and learning to speak and communicate our love in a way that the other person understands. (Think a native Italian speaking man in a relationship with a native French speaking woman, both trying to learn the others native tongue in order to communicate effectively with one another, & that is the metaphor behind learning one another's love languages.) Well we have been making an effort to do this but I never once thought we'd have such different ideas about what love is. To understand this, and understand this post, you'll need a little back story.
I did not have a conventional upbringing whatsoever. I am the product of a one night stand between a 16 year old girl & a 22 year old man. Angela (my birth mother) is the product of a broken home where her own mother (what would be my grandmother) kicked her and her two younger brothers out onto the streets when she was just the tender age of 13, because my biological grandmother's boyfriend, at the time, did not like children. To no surprise, my young mother found herself pregnant again by the age of 19 and also became heavily addicted to drugs. So much so, that when I was four years old, my mother locked me and my four month old brother in a room inside our one bedroom trailer while she went out on a three day drug binge. Take that all in for a moment.. an infant and a preschooler were locked away, alone in a room for days on end by their own mother because of addiction.
This was my example of what love was. Not a very great one, huh? Well before we get too depressed here, he and I were found and taken away by police & social services, to eventually be placed in a home with a couple who had tried for 15 years to have children but could not. It was in this home that my adoptive mother, April, showed me, taught me, and filled me with what real love is. She taught me about forgiveness and how to practice it, even when it came to forgiving my birth mother for abandoning us. She taught me how to overcome the pain of the various types of abuse I had experienced at the hands of my birth mother, and her many boyfriends.
I believed that because my own mother chose drugs over me, and never showed up for visitations to get her rights back, that for whatever reason, I wasn't worth loving. I didn't deserve love. I was unplanned, unwanted, and abandoned, all before I even learned how to read. Those kinds of damages can and did destroy my psyche and made me feel like I had to work harder, or be better, or -you fill in the blanks- to be deserving of love. But out of the ashes and rubble, my new mother built me up, piece by piece, teaching me how to cope and overcome these deeply cut wounds. Now I'm 22 and I am finding that the issues I thought I had overcome, still impact me in my everyday life and the ripples touch my relationships to this day. I have a tendency to try to earn the love in my life and when I don't see the results I feel I've worked for, I begin to look to myself to find out what I did wrong. You see, the relationship between mother and child is supposed to be the first relationship where you are exposed unconditional love and when that foundation is broken, when that first, most important relationship is abandoned by the mother, it is the child that is damaged. And greatly so. Fortunately for me, my new mother filled me with so much love that I am now able to look back on my birth mother with sympathy, understanding, forgiveness, and yes, love. Eric, well he has a different story altogether.
He was born the second, and middle child, of two very traditional Italian and Polish devout Catholics. When he was 16, and decided that Catholicism wasn't the religion he believed in there was strife. But even before this, (which he revealed to me in this intimate conversation,) his father never once told him that he was loved until he was 20 years old. "I love you" wasn't said in his home by the men in the family. (He has 2 brothers, no sisters.) And because of this his idea of love is very different than my own. He said to me that family members were met with a firm handshake, whereas in my family, love was overflowing. (Not to say my new family was perfect, but our parents adopted four children from broken, drug-riddled families where the concept of love was not & had to do some serious damage control, as I like to call it. Our mother had a gift for teaching and because of it we grew up knowing that love from her was unconditional and nothing we did or said would ever change that. His family, (which seemed like a "white picket fence" life I'd only ever imagined,) turned out to have deeply scarring issues too. He wasn't taught about love the way that I was. Love to him, was a nice idea, but it wasn't the root of all good things. It was viewed more like the potatoes and less like the steak of a meal; its a nice side dish, but he grew accustomed to not feel a need for love, something which he has never truly experienced. (Personally, I believe his parents and family do love him, but back to the love languages, I feel that there was a certain miscommunication there and he grew up feeling unloved and unwanted, much like I did, but without the constant reassurance that he was, in fact, deeply loved.
Which brings us to our current relationship.. He and I set up a challenge together. He would get out of his comfort zone and try to understand and apply my ideas of what love is to our own relationship in order to, not only help us grow together, but also to test his idea that love is meaningless and is conditional. So, I give you my new and improved personal blog about digging into what love really is. I plan to write daily (or as much as possible) with examples, and excerpts, and anecdotes from all over (including my own parents, who are marriage counselors and have been together for 32 years now) about what love is.
Responses are welcome and personal ideas about what love has meant to you would be greatly appreciated!
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Life Lessons...Lessons You Can Only Learn as You Go
So earlier this evening, as my boyfriend and I sat down to do homework, one of his assignments caught my attention (& distracted me from my own..oops!) The assignment was titled Letter of Self-Compassion (...or something of that nature) & started off by watching a Ted Talks segment. The womanwho was speaking, Brene' Brown, was a researcher in the area of social work & in short, the topic was about the power of vulnerability. She spoke about connection and the ability to feel connected is why we are here. The unfortunate reality that unravels and depletes connection is shame. Shame-this "I'm not *blank* enough"- this idea that you have to hide parts of who you are in order to feel connected. The reality is that in order to truly connect, you have to have the courage to be vulnerable and reveal who you are to others. That is when connection & deep connection really can blossom. The study showed that the difference between people who have a sense of love and belonging and those who didn't was simply this.. Those who had that sense of worthiness believed they deserved love and belonging. That's it. Anyway, his assignment (worth 100 points, btw) was to identify a struggle and then write a letter to himself (as himself from 5 years down the road) and offer words of encouragement as if speaking to a friend. I, being a lover of writing, happened to already have a journal and thought this would be an excellent prompt for myself and my own pursuit of personal growth. So I wrote. We played some awesome acoustic blends and we wrote. What I thought would be a paragraphed sized response, for me turned into a five page entry and an eye-opener for the greatest struggle I am currently dealing with in my own life. Beyond the daily humdrum of financial, academic, familial, and other "surface area" struggles (as I like to refer to them as) was my struggle. A most fundamental, yet insanely complex struggle. And that is of fear. Of what you are putting into the ground now to be harvested & yet fearing that the rains won't come and the sun won't shine, thus crippling yourself, and pushing you to squash out the foundations of what you've already put into motion. Long story short, the prompt, which for many, I can only assume, was a mundane act of busy work, for me opened my eyes and forced me to really examine how this fear was effecting my life in such a negative way. And me being me, just can't see something like that in myself and not do something about it.
More to come.
More to come.
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