Weekly Wisdom – Love Letter to Life

Have you ever written a love letter to life?

I hadn’t, until this morning. I was sensing my way into writing something to share, but everything I thought of landed as bland. I wondered what had energy and meaning for me. Then the invitation to write a love letter to life showed up.

I had no idea what such a letter would be. The point wasn’t to write something that I know, but rather it was to deeply explore my relationship with life. However the invitation was clear. Not to write about my sorrows, my challenges, my dreams, or my frustrations and fears about the world. Not about my triumphs, my learning, or growth. Not about possibilities or causes deserving attention. But about something that I realize has been very present with me lately.

My awareness of life itself. My constant awareness of the power to choose, and create, that life gives us. My growing awareness of what I am creating, and what I could create. The possibility to create my life with beauty, as my work of art. My awareness of life and my aliveness as a gift. It always starts with life, and my forgetfulness of it.

…gratefulness is the measure of our aliveness.
— Brother David Steindl-Rast

Design Perspective

With this invitation I found myself not reviewing or assessing the content and stories of my life and history. Rather, I found myself in wonder at the miracle that life is, regardless of its content. In gratitude for the gift that it is. Life is not earned; it is given as a gift. As is every breath, every moment. And life seems to ask, “what are you going to do with the gift?”

Of course we can be in dire circumstances, difficulties, and situations that we have no control over. Yet even in those situations we have choice, not to control the external world, but to choose how we respond to it. How we will be with it. Life is our dance partner.

Here are some of the reflections from my love letter to life:

I’m near the end of the gift of my journey in this life. Some say there is another, but I’ll just say thank you for this one. With deep gratitude, and love for the love you have shown me. When I pause and get out of the assessment factory that humans seem to live in, when I look at the very fact of my existence, the fact of the universe I have arrived in, I am in awe, wonder, and profound appreciation. Life is miraculous, and you have always shared your miracle with me.

I have my moments of frustrations, pains, moods, and breakdowns. I take them as part of the human journey, my life journey, with gratitude for all of it. I also have the incredible experiences of joy, illumination, connection, fulfillment, and love with others. I embrace it all.

Underneath every moment and life pulsing awareness I feel my attraction to you, hunger for you, and utter delight that you respond with your gifts of presence, aliveness, possibility, and love. As a lover I am always looking for you. As a child I want your embraces. As a friend I appreciate your sharing time with me. As an elder I appreciate your care for me. As a parent I am blessed by what you reveal to me in the newness of the emergence of others.

…Even in this world that is full of hate, violence, craziness, the disconnected denial of others, and denial to the call to create life. You are still there.

…With you as with those I love, I am much more with them than without them. I am nurtured and cultivated by their love, by their accepting of my love, and by my learning to love. And it is your love that opens this aliveness in me.

… I always come back to you, into your arms, holding hands with you, and am blessed that you always accompany me, you are always there, always with care, giving me breath, my next heartbeat, my place of awareness.