Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage. -Lao Tzu
Last Driftwood and Grace newsletter we gave the invitation to recognise and offer self compassion in Self-Compassion - A Gift Our World so Desperately Needs.
Check it out here if you missed it.
An Invitation
Today I’d like to invite thankfulness for our beginnings, as I offer thanks for my parents on what is already (in Australia at least), their 55th wedding anniversary.
I hesitated with the words and almost wrote “what would have been” but finally settled on “what is” because while Mum has been in heaven these last six anniversaries, their marriage still holds the love, commitment, and stability it has brought to our family through our childhoods, and all the decades since.
I speak as an adult child of their marriage, but only Dad truly knows the distance from heaven to earth and as Wordsworth wrote in one of his Lucy poems re that separation “…and oh, the difference to me”.
Today, I’d like to take this container of marriage, of a committed relationship, and hold it in awe and gratitude.
Giving thanks for the precious contents that container keeps safe.
Kahlil Gibran wrote of parents in “The Prophet”
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.
I love to think of both of my parents, pliable, bending in the archer’s hand, creating a stable “bow” from which my siblings and I have been first nurtured, and then propelled into life.
I love to think of the stability and hope their love has given to me even as I seek to honour my own vows to the beautiful human being I call mi esposo maravilloso.
I understand, that for many, this isn’t and hasn’t been their experience. I don’t write to compare, cause pain, or make judgement. I write to express my soul deep thanks that for my parents, their love was never “spilt”.
So, whatever your formative experiences of love have been, I invite you, if you feel you would like to, to imagine.
To imagine…
First within your mind’s eye, and then within the grasp of your own hands, to imagine and feel into a container, a vessel, worthy of holding love.
Perhaps its gold and glittering fit for a palace.
Perhaps its roughly hewn timber lovingly crafted by work roughened hands.
Perhaps its marble taken from the earth and smoothed to a vessel able to hold something other than its own cold stone.
Perhaps its branches or flowers woven together by wisdom borrowed from the smallest of birds and sealed with spiderweb to keep the contents sure.
Take a moment, if you feel safe to do so, to imagine and in imagining, to craft into being, this vessel that you would trust to carry love.
See it.
Hold it.
Move your hands around it lovingly.
Sense what you are holding and how truly precious this vessel is.
Hold it close.
Feel its texture and weight and the way it transfers a little something of itself to you, just by being held this close.
Feel it expand within your hands as you value how precious this vessel is.
Allow the awareness of possessing a vessel worthy of love to fill you.
The vessel is yours.
You brought it into being by the quality of your own imaginings. There is no other vessel of love identical to what you have fashioned with your own heart.
Feel the joy of being able to bring love to yourself, and, if you choose, to others because of inviting a space for love and a vessel to hold it safe.
Feel love. Feel the purity and perfectness of love. Watch as it moves within your vessel, touching the insides even as it peers out ready to give of itself where it is needed.
Feel love. Breathe love. Touch love. Hold love. Feel, feel, feel what love is as you carry your vessel in awe and gratitude. Ready perhaps to share, but never to diminish love in the sharing.
Learn love.
Love teaches.
Love gifts.
Love births.
Carry lovingly this vessel.
This vessel worthy of love.
Thank you for you. Thank you for sharing time. Thank you for your loving heart.
Welcome here.
Welcome to living your life.
Consciously.
Lovingly.
Gently.
Be kind to you.
Be kind.
Have a wonderful day.
Lovingly,
Melanie Williams de Amaya
Driftwood and Grace