What's love?

To love another means to understand them.
To love means to see them for who they are.
To love means to support their happiness.
To love means to rejoice in their growth and development.

We can develop this kind of love for everyone. We can move through the world with this love. In this way, we can love friends, strangers and even our opponents.

I see you. I respect you. I can understand your situation and see why you might think that is in your best interest. I might not agree with you, but I rejoice in your efforts to lift yourself so you can live a better life.

What prevents us from loving others in this way? Our own small mindedness. Our own fixation to our position and place. Our own inability to love and accept who we are, much less who others are.

By supporting and growing our own hearts, we can learn to expand our love to everyone. By understanding ourselves more fully, we become more in tune with others. Expand our self-awareness, and we expand our circle of acceptance.

Thank you, dear reader.

It can be a strange experience to share your thoughts and feelings across the blogosphere.  The connections you make, the conversations you have, the hearts touched and the faces you never see.  It can be both entirely personal and yet entirely connected at the same time.  It is hard to put into words the impact that others make in your life, usually the only thing that gives due justice is thank you.  The Tibetan for thank you is thujeche, which literally means great compassion or kindness.  Here is to celebrating your kindness and your support.  Thank you.

I sit, stand and walk,
catching fleeting reminders
of where we have been
and where we want to go.
Moments of clarity and insight,
of fear and anger and exaltation, 
strewn across a lifetime of moments,
captured in bottles left to drift at sea.

May you stumble upon what you need,
a worn wood inscription,
a chance encounter,
a guidepost on your journey,
a cairn on a forgotten path,
a note in a book you've always had.

Wherever you are,
this battle is not your own.
Those paths you walk,
those lonely and precarious paths,
you are not alone. 
We are out there,
we are all over,
and we walk with you.