10 truths: Picking up the pieces...

Ten truths worth telling:

1. That thing you really don't want to do is the one thing you really need to do.
2. All suffering ends.  You'll always pick up the pieces and build a stronger YOU in the aftermath.
3. Honor your impulses - if you don't, the energy builds up inside you and becomes something else you really don't want.
4. The time you spend in indecision changes the circumstances surrounding the things you must choose from.  You may have lost a very good thing by waiting to know if it was good enough to choose.
5. Real love never looks the way you thought it would.  Stop looking for it and starting feeling for it instead.
6. Don't allow someone else to choose for you.  They'll never be right.
7. When you don't feel good, put on your hottest jeans, your biggest earrings and pretend that you feel like a million bucks.  Even if no one else bears witness.
8. Dancing cures all ills, soothes all hearts, rids a mind of worry and translates emotional energy into joy, which is the fuel for the beautiful flow of life.
9. All joys and pains, friends and foes, triumphs and failures are meant to teach you something.  Pay attention - and love the painful moments as much as the blissful ones.  The greatest gifts lie in the darkest corners.
10. Falling in love is always worth it.  Always.  Don't tell yourself the old stories of heartbreak.  Heartbreak is only a memory.  Love is what is real, and it is waiting for you to open the door now.

A tree grows in the concrete.
It knows its odds of growing old are not great.
It cares not if its time is short,
rather it cares only to say "I'm here."
"This shadow is mine."
"I've earned what I've accomplished."
"I grew here to teach you a lesson, and
I'm happy to have had the opportunity to help you grow stronger."

Soul groups & the power of love...

Spiritual teachers are telling us that we are all on a path to enlightenment.  We are starting to know ourselves in a deeper way and we are connecting with our higher, divine selves.  I've experienced this for years.  We are also tuning into our soul-level connections with each other and our soul groups are being revealed to us.  Have you noticed?

It happens when you meet someone with whom you have an instant understanding.  Someone you feel deep and pure love for and with.  When that happens, that someone is part of your soul group and it serves as a sign for you that your soul group is ready to find each other and do more powerful work on our planet at this time.  

As your soul sisters and brothers are revealed to you more and more, know that the purpose of this is to teach you - and all of us - how to love.  When you find that you love your friends, your teachers, your students, your colleagues... for reasons that you can't quite explain, then know that it is for the purpose of learning how to love all humans on Earth.  It is this love - as it expands to people we don't know and will never meet - that will replace hate and violence with peace and compassion in the world.  

Several members of my soul group have been revealed to me in recent years and it is clear to me that we each get each other in a way that goes far beyond the kind of friendship I remember having with people ten or twenty years ago.  There is a shift happening.

Are you aware of your own soul group?  Do you feel a deep love for people unlike any you've had in the past?  Pay attention to this and take a moment to reflect on why you are being given this gift at this time in life. And know that this kind of powerful and selfless love is divine and healing and you are a messenger of God... so go... and spread the love.

The look of love...

I've been to more weddings than I can count.  I've loved each one even more than I thought I would.  Being surrounded by so much love is contagious, you know.  Last night was no exception.

Meghan & Rob

Being witness to a promise made by two people to each other is quite a beautiful thing.  I've witnessed many broken promises and broken hearts in my life and they can be the kind of thing that leads some people to become despondent, pessimistic and give up on love all together.  But sharing in someone else's love story and being surrounded by so many others who love and support one couple's love story can fill a heart with faith in love and even - in my opinion - help to heal a broken heart and help some find faith again.  Thankfully, and despite a broken heart or two of my own, I've always had that faith.

The tradition I witnessed, as such, was full of the kind of ceremony and moments that one comes to expect at an American wedding.  The pledging of love, the kisses on command, the first dance and the reminder of long-standing love amongst the oldest and longest-married couples in the room.  It feels new and tender in this space if you open your heart to it, just like falling in love feels new and full of wonder - even after a broken heart or two.  There are some who have given up and closed themselves to knowing and witnessing what I did last night and to those people I say be open, forgive and believe in second (or third, or fourth) chances for love.

Love doesn't feel like or look like it does on a wedding day forever and some people, while they claim to know this, still seek moments in life that look or feel like the excitement of love at first sight or first kiss.  Far too many walk away prematurely when the honeymoon phase wears off because they prefer excitement and newness to the mundaneness of life.  Some hold on too long, suffering through something they should not and some (the couples who get to remain dancing the longest during that traditional married couples dance) have enough faith to hold on through the rough times that prove to be the cement of their foundation.  No love story looks like another and sometimes love is not promised forever.  But every opportunity for love teaches you something about yourself and gives you an opportunity to love someone in a way that can fill you with so much more than can be imagined or dreamt about.

So what does love look like?  I'm no expert but I've learned a thing or two...

Love requires work but it is generous in its giving.  Love does not exist on the surface of anything - not in the look of a person, an occasion or an interaction.  Sometimes even the most fumbling and awkward initial interaction can lead to the greatest love.  There is no perfect.  There is no script and there is no recognizable path.  The moment loves seems like it is something you have seen before, somewhere else, it is not love but rather someone else's story that's already been told (that includes your own).  Love is surprising and always shows you something you hadn't before seen - about the world, about life, about yourself.

So relax your gaze, open your heart and take a fresh look - no matter how many times you've tried before.  Perhaps what you are seeking will open to you when you change your own perspective and look in a new way rather than looking for something at all.

Love is a dance worth dancing - don't sit it out.

Loving someone you've never met...

No, I'm not talking about online dating.  I'm talking about a contagious Love that has caught me and so many others completely by surprise.  It is the Love for 32 orphaned girls in Mtwapa, Kenya that exists within a community of volunteers for an organization called One Home Many Hopes.  This is a community to which I happily belong.

I've worked with underprivileged children for as long as I can remember.  In many ways, I was one myself, receiving the support of kindhearted church-goers who funded summer camp for me and my sister, and the like. I have been working with, loving, and going out of my way to take care of children who need me since I became an adult and I don't see an end to that but I've found myself in a state of awe for the Love that exists in the One Home Many Hopes (OHMH) community.

When I attended an event in May of 2010 at the request of my friend and OHMH volunteer, Tracy, I was surprised to find well over 200 other people in attendance.  I wondered to myself if I had somehow missed the boat.  How had I not heard about an organization with this kind of following in my own town?  I brought my mom to the event which was a great experience because she was able to witness what turned out to be my Love at First Sight moment with the organization.  We sat in the front row, directly in front of the projection screen where I first saw the faces and voices of a group of girls I will now do anything I can to help.

By the time the time Anthony Mulongo (the Kenyan who rescued and housed each of these girls) was finished speaking, I was in tears and I had been changed for life.  I had fallen in Love.  I hugged the man I'd never before met and promised to do anything I could.  And I am.

I brought home magnets with the girls faces that night and put them on my refrigerator.  I now look at those beautiful girls each time I open the door.  I smile at them, talk to them and tell them I Love them.

To those who know me, this isn't much of a surprise - or very far out of the ordinary for me.  I care.  A LOT.  But there has been something special about the way I feel connected to OHMH and these girls that I can't quite explain.  And then, today happened.

Today I asked another volunteer, Cristina, to tell me her story about what drew her to OHMH.  Cristina sent me the link to her story on the organization's website, and I was amazed to learn that volunteering for OHMH is the reason she decided NOT to move out of the country.  I mean, people move for all sorts of reasons and they are typically not come upon lightly.  Some of us have even left behind relationships, families and best friends for the promise of something greater.  But to STAY for a nonprofit that can't pay you for your dedication?  That's unheard of!  I had a wonderful chat with Cristina who is equally in Love with the 32 girls who live in an orphanage in Kenya that she, too, has not met.  I thought this was a pretty incredible moment in my day.  After all, I'm giving my birthday this year to the girls, Cristina gave up an international relocation...  Really! What is in the OHMH water?

But Cristina's story was not the end of my amazement today.  My sister, Suzie, fell in Love with OHMH today, too.  Now, you should know that my sister is as about as opposite from me as she could be.  I'm a woman of words and emotion, she is a woman of images and thought.  I'm a teacher, a writer, and a motivator to causes.  My sister is a photographer with a dry wit who rarely shows the kind of gushy, mushiness that has long been part of my trademark.  Case in point:  She finally posted a response to her only sister's blog yesterday for the first time.  The entry she commented on was the deeply personal essay I wrote about Setting Boundaries.  What did she write, you might ask?  And I'm quoting her here:  "hey. that stop sign is in my neck of the woods."  Yup, she commented on the photograph I used to illustrate my deeply poignant message about boundaries. Oy.

Suzie and I have come to appreciate our differences and I love that my sister shows the world through her lens what is in her heart - and she's damn good at it!  She photographs the unique love of families, pregnant women in their most joyful moments, and babies who don't give a damn about the camera - and somehow each image manages to capture a moment in time that I'm pretty sure her subjects weren't even aware of.  You would understand, then, that I would never expected to get an email from my sister today with a two-page heart-felt letter written to every single one of her friends explaining her Love for the girls of Mudzini Kwetu. 

My sister told me that her letter, and her Love for OHMH, came to her this morning while she was at church.  The message of that sermon was simply that "faith always has a plan."  I wish I had heard the rest of that sermon but I'm pretty sure her minister was talking about the kind of plan that built OHMH and has brought so many of us to have the kind of faith that allows us to Fall in Love with the girls, the cause and the community it has created.  I'm pretty sure that faith's plan is to show us all this kind of Love - the kind of Love that allows you to devote yourself to someone you've never met - and the kind of Love is changing the world.  


Have a OHMH Love Story of your own to share?  Send it to OHMHLoveStories (at) g m a i l (dot) c o m!