This does not mean we understand love. It means that we can, over time, if we commit. When we step on to a path do we know what it will reveal? Rarely. Do we know the way? We just follow the path. We train our selves to follow the signs along the way. Time to get strong ahead. Time to let go around the bend. Time to heal right now. Time to pick up the pace or perhaps slow down.
To think anything is invincible is to live a lie. To seek something that can eliminate our inherent vulnerability as people thrown into the forces of life is not possible. Love loses at times. Even in our wisest states, there are situations where love cannot prevail It is not love's place to do so. Our lives are a practice in best case scenarios, that is all we can ask for. We cannot burden love with the impossible. We can only seek to spend the time we can in its wisdom.
Many things can shape our paths, most commonly fear and expectation. There is following and there is revealing. This has to do with our times of blindness when we do not know where to go. We need to be able to step back and allow our hearts to reveal the direction. They always know, but we need to give them room to expose our hidden wisdom to us. Are we in the way, or are we letting our hearts point the way? That is always the question.
One of the great false notions of love is that it is a thing of emotion, the keeper of excitement, desire, and passion. None of these are real love. Love resides over emotion, It has the task of regulating excitement and emotion. This is proper love. This is why love is so precious and so challenging. It is real love that keeps our emotions from causing us suffering. Real love is the master of emotions not the slave of emotions. It is a hard earned skill to allow love to teach us how to allow us to do this work. We can begin by putting things in their proper order.
It is a very old story, this one of all things that must return to the flawed and imperfect reality of being human, us being part of all things. Love does not erase imperfection in others, in our selves, nor in the world as a whole. It can only reveal wisdom. How do we best deal with the imperfections of other? The world? Our selves? Love can guide us.
In this church we talk about trees quite a bit. They look like complex things on the outside, so many leaves and branches, and yet a tree is simple. Love flows most wisely through things that live like trees do.
Wisdom requires we empower the physical expression of things, that we do not fail to engage in the practical use of a given wisdom. Love requires we understand and empower the non physical nature of our existence. To seek to find any meaning relating to love in our physical lives without fully appreciating love as the non-physical force that it is, is to walk blindly through life in regards to love.
To fear repetition, the same stories repeating themselves over and over, is to fear life, and to some degree, fear success. It is certainly to fear becoming. Wisdom that has bloomed is the realization that all of life is just a bunch of circles we walk in. What nourishes and governs the wisdom that protects our heart thrives on the predictable behavior of things including our selves, this while staying loose enough to account for the chaotic influences of life. Do not fear life becoming predictable or you will be sadly disappointed. Learn to find joy walking in circles.
This journey metaphor thing is just too important to set aside. Find comfort in this. In this you can do no wrong, Through all of your ups and downs, successes and failures, you, like everyone else, are just on a long walk. Our success lies in how we deal with the moment. That is all it ever is. We bring love into the journey because we have been given a heart and love, wise love, is what can nourish and calm our hearts on our long and tireless journeys. In the end we are but one story in a million stories. All of our stories are familiar. They are processes, passages laden with times of triumph as well as failures, pain and regret. This is the human story, always has been always will be.
Be a captain of your vessel. Own your journey, all of it. Make your life an adventure and ask your heart to lead the way. When we come to the end of our stories it will all be nothing more than a journey from point A to point B. Birth to death. What lies in between is ours to shape as best as we can. To rise above our selves at any moment and be able to see our selves and ships out to sea, finding their way one challenge at a time, is crucial to acquiring the strength and wisdom we need to persevere, as well as the ability to forgive our selves for sometimes breaking under the pressure of life.