L'Autre

How is it that I don't speak more to you about love?

I have been avoiding the subject even though it would appear that all these words have grown from that root.  And they have.

But I have avoided the pain of speaking of that other who, I believe, we all lean toward.  And even while I dug the ground, planted the seeds, watered and waited, wasn't it love I was attempting to find there this whole time?

There is the survival.  There is the learning.  There is the being.  And perhaps I have passed through all three of these stages since moving through the first pains of having a life completely torn apart in ways I wouldn't have constructed as a "future."

But it was.

And All Is Gift.

How can I live this fully, when the hammers in the heart (as Rilke says) have sounded both their demolishing ringing and the gentle, purposeful, regular tapping of something being constructed?  I am struck and resonating.  Not so much reconstructed (how does one reconstruct a sound, that invisible song?) because I feel new additions here--ones I know I wouldn't have designed myself.  Because maybe I think I don't deserve it.  But these are killing words that cut this building apart at odd and useless angles.  Leave them be.

And perhaps this is what I am reaching for here:

I have thought I had it under control.  Is it this very sense that I had finally "gotten it right" that meets me here now, placing me in a field I've never seen before?  Watching things end and begin?

In every moment of my life, I have known God's superabundant presence pushing me firmly and gently as one would teach a child to walk, to speak, to share, to love.

All is movement.  Toward the other.  Sheltered by Love's Guide.