Courage

Just Be Brave Enough to …

If there’s one quality that makes the difference between a half and fully lived life, it’s courage. Not foolhardiness, desperation, bravado. But defiant, graceful courage.

Just be brave enough to love. That is all courage is.

First. Let the cynicism and irony go. They’re ways to sugarcoat bitter disappointment. But their price is steep: settling for mediocrity. We are spending our time, energy, selves, rubbing salt in each other’s wounds. Who is healed this way? Who really lives a little more fully through snark?

Just be brave enough to love. I don’t mean it an abstract way. Just a radically simple one. Take a look around. At the people in your life. They are part of you, you are part of them. Who is suffering now, here, most? Just go spend time with them. Make it an obligation.

Don’t force them, deny them, pressure them. Don’t do anything. Just see them. Really see them. That is the beginning of love. And in being witnessed, our wounds begin to heal. There is nothing more full of grace in this little life than just really seeing someone as they truly are.

Go make this a way. Practice it every day, this habit of being brave enough to love. And a sense of strength, wonder, defiance, gratitude will overwhelm you. You will be kneeling. Now you are humble, and in humility is the beginning of your true path.

Love is an ache, too. The more that you are brave enough to love, the more you will ache. But not every ache is pain. The seed breaks, the rain falls. There is an ache in them, too. The ache of love is the bursting open of the seed within you. It is the rain in you falling onto the endless ocean of being.

Now you are really here, alive, aware, awake. To what life really is. Not name, form, shape. But essence, purpose, becoming. When you are brave enough to love you are awakening all these in each person that you see, just by seeing.

This world, the world of power and possession, will always try to take away your ability to really love. Instead of seeing people, truths, beauty, oneness, it will tell you, command you, to see dead things glittering in the distance. That is how it makes a slave of you. But the only thing glittering on the carcasses is the eyes of the vultures.

Here is a secret.

The only one who can really take away your power to be brave enough to love is you. It is the truest thing in you. Because it does not belong to you at all.

Just as the seed contains the whole forest, so you contain all of being. Life, death, fear, suffering, longing, stretching, awareness, the separation from and return to the source. All this is in you, and something greater still. Possibility and transformation. And you bring it to life each and every time you are brave enough to love.

Just make it a way.

Umair

Philadelphia

August 2016