weekend thoughts

it was one of those completely full weekends.
with tons of thoughts.

there's one about love i'm kinda mullin' over in my head.

the first part of it came to visit me on saturday.
it was the idea that if you want to totally open to love,
you have to totally open to everything -
EVERYTHING - not just the person you want to love -
but all of life.

to open means you can't be closed.
anywhere.
right?

so if you're not closed, then you're open.

yes, i know.
very scholarly thoughts here.

okay, now i just should prolly say 'i' cause i can only speak for myself here.
if i'm totally open, then i feel all the stuff that i try not to feel.
all the stuff i work so hard on tucking away or blocking -
that all comes pouring in too.
there are no blocks to keep it out.
and i don't always want all that.
so most of the time, i stay closed to some point.

this weekend i found myself in a place where it seemed way important to
totally open. even tho i really didn't want to. i don't think i could have articulated
to you that it was cause i didn't want to open to all my feelings, but some part
of me understood that and resisted a bit at first, and then dived in.

and what happened was this progression of feeling all the stuff in my life...bad stuff too.
bad stuff surfaced right away. but it just came thru quickly. i was like a hallway
where things were passing thru. and then the good stuff came thru, and then
the love came thru and well, when that happens for real, there is no hallway
anymore, there's no me. there just is. ya know?

and somewhere for the first time, i could put the words around the process.
i understood in a different way -
i had to open to everything to open to love.

wow.

and then sunday nite, i got to thinking about it all again. i got to thinking about the
whole weekend and all the different kindsa love it was filled with. and yet, how
most of the time i wasn't totally open.

i mean, seriously, i could count on my hand (maybe two hands...but two hands tops)
of the moments i've been totally open in my life.

so does that mean the moments of love where i'm not toally open are just shades
of love? i showered trying to figure this out. are there different degrees of love?
different levels?

i went back to 'love is a verb' and thought about that.......
if you're loving are you closed?
well, yeah, i gotta say most of the time i'm closed at least a bit.
i'm open to the person, but you know the deal....even to the person a whole lotta
times some parts of you are closed.

i thought about all the people and how i had this and that and this and that up
protecting me here and there. or just maybe cause i was tired, and just didn't
have all the energy to open. or distracted. or millions of reasons.

confused, i curled in with my guy. 'i have a question about love for you.'
when i tried to explain it, the first thing he said was 'you're forgetting that love's a verb.'
i grinned. i hadn't forgotten. but i loved he went right there.

but then he did the thing that i value so much, he went right to the thing i had missed.
he asked 'do you mean be open to the person or be open to everything?'

there he was. right on it. he hadn't forgotten at all.
we had talked of it the day before.
i had understood the day before you had to be open to everything.
i had that thought the day before.
and here, the next night, i had totally let that slip thru my fingers and i was back
in the much smaller sphere of just being open to the person.

(okay....so in case i'm not making sense - a recap-
i think up until this weekend, i had thought if you were totally open to the person
you were loving, that was awesome. (certainly a hard enough goal, one that i rarely
do anyway - and i'm talking every kinda relationship there is)
...but then i got the idea that it's the larger sphere of being open to the all - not just the
person, but all of life - that in that space you really find love.)

i groaned at his question. remembering that there was no way i was open to the all
with every interaction. i hadn't even gotten the first sphere down of being totally open to
the people. 'how can anyone ever really do that???' i asked.

he gave his answer that is his code for what we become after we die.
that i wasn't gonna get it until i left the human sphere and became love for real.

i groaned.
wishing i could get as content as he was about the whole deal.
but then again, i like that i'm not.
cause it just keeps me wanting to try harder.
i know.
i know.
i won't get it down.
but what a cool thing to work on -

opening your heart as much as you can as wide as you can.
cause you know somewhere in there is god.