Miracles in Great Love
I have yet to meet a woman who is not on a journey.
Travelling down the path of love, I remember the first movie I watched about love: “Pretty Woman”. We wanted the handsome, rich, businessman to love and accept the female lead, a prostitute, and rescue her from her life. Movie after movie retells this story where the man makes the final decision about love. All the romance novels, movies and stories have this awakening moment, when the man realizes he can’t live without the woman and then there is an inevitable chase.
The formula goes like this: guy and girl meet, he decides he loves her, and then chases her to tell her. Young girls learn that men decide what love will be like, feel like and that it’s their choice. We teach them that the power of love lies in the hands of men, and it’s their choice to love us. It’s as though we as women have no say, but are beholden to whether a man chooses us. How sick and twisted.
Before our wisdom takes root, many women believe this familiar story of love. But all of it is false. A fairytale told to every girl in hopes she won’t learn the real secret, a way to control and leave her in a neverending search. Perhaps this is the plan, as long as women are waiting, hoping, searching and longing for a great love to choose her, she will grow weary and too tired to wake up from the slumber. Maybe if she’s exhausted, she won’t learn her true power.
I still remember the first boy I ever loved, and the ones that followed that seemed like love to me. I morphed parts of myself to resemble what I thought they were looking for, but I had certain boundaries about boys. I was convinced in high school that boys would distract me from my school work. With absolutely no idea that I’d be a girl worth “choosing”, I thought I was doomed to the “best friend” in all my male encounters. God, how grateful I am now that I was on the sidelines for very good reasons.
During my marriage, I was continually surprised that he chose me. I accepted less than favourable behaviour because I wanted the illusion to continue. I was the girl that was picked!
As I entered my 30s, I started to ask if this was it. Was this how love was? Since I grew up in a single parent home, I watched my mother search for her great love. I think she met him once, but he wasn’t ready for her. I remember how sad and brokenhearted she was, and at 12, I vowed that would never happen to me. I would never allow myself to love someone so much that I would be brokenhearted.
There were two times where I was madly in love. Manic love, where I was willing to compromise the best parts of who I was in order to experience the illusion of his love. I thought if I just stayed long enough he would change, he would have his ‘A-ha moment’ and finally choose me. Looking back, I see the bullets that I dodged when he didn’t “choose me.” I had to take those paths, and travel these roads of love, not a final destination, but always with stops along the way to learn who I am.
The wisdom of love teaches this lesson: great love of self and God are the only roads worth taking and having a co-pilot extends the journey and makes it much richer.Great love of self should be experienced with an equally competent partner. One who’s interested in diving into the best parts of their great love.
Each person is on a journey to the center of themselves, where great love resides. It doesn’t involve a chase scene, or another person’s awakening where they decide to love you. A woman said to me recently, that she could not be in my kind of a relationship because it was too independent for her. It didn’t have enough “togetherness.”
My reply is this: “Great love will elude you if you think it’s another’s responsibility to give you your great love.” You’ve got to embrace your internal great love in order to ever give great love to another.
My belief in great love is often met with surprise and wonder. I firmly believe in great love. Not great love in the romantic comedy sense, but in great love of self, life, our partners and our purpose.
Great love is all encompassing. Great love is our light. That internal portion of God that was placed in each of us to show us who we truly are. Who we are is great love.
What has become very clear is that our journey is not a single path, one channel, or right or wrong. It’s like a rake, that when dragged through the dirt makes simultaneous, but equally important pathways. As years pass, we all travel many pathways that all have one destination in mind. Our soul is the internal GPS that leads us back to the very place we started: Great Love.
Our spiritual journey inward combines meditation, praying, writing, learning, talking, loving, expressing, teaching, and repeat. In relationships, we think that it’s got to continue forever, and if it ends we think we have failed in love. What if we thought of each relationship as the bus, train, plane or car that you need to take in order to get to great love? In any journey, do we not take several types of transportation? What if we could see relationships in this way? The ending would not be tragic, but rather an ending of that leg of the journey.
“Every seed has it’s full form within it, but it needs the rain, the sun, the heat to become corn, potato or flower. And every poem or painting or piece of music — indeed- every act of love- is carried within us like a seed, but each needs the rain and heat of experience to become its full expression of the world… in my humble opinion in order to become great love, we need each other.”
Melody Beattie
Weeding our gardens to grow the seeds of love that are within each of us, this very act of opening up, taking the first step, beginning a new book, having a conversation, little by little each of those drops encourage us to become the ultimate great love we all seek, our Divine Nature.
Years ago, healing from a broken heart, I read a book that suggested the best way to heal was to write your history of love. Document all the people that you once loved along the way. The first boy I thought was cute, “Thank You, David”. My first boy-crazy crush, “Thank You, Curtis”. The first boy who taught me tough lessons, “Thank You, Trevor.” The first boy who was adorable on paper, “Thank You, Mark”. The first boy who married me, “Thank You, Dale”. The first boy who was my best friend, “Thank You, Stacey”. To the first boy who showed me true independence and healthy love, “Thank You, Jamie”.
Just like that, there is my great love story to the center of myself. What is yours? I’d love to hear your stories of great love. What have you learned about yourself? Kindly and gently, bless the broken parts of yourself, bless the road it took to get you here. Is it about time to embrace great love?
