What's Next Is What's New
I woke up from a dream this morning still repeating loudly inside me, like a chant I didn’t realize until that moment was secretly announcing this truth all the time throughout every inch of my body: “I CAN’T RISK EXPOSURE.”
At first and in the context of a global pandemic, “I CAN’T RISK EXPOSURE,” seems like it has to do with all the fear around contracting the coronavirus. All the efforts I’ve made for the past six months to keep my son, and myself, and my family safe.
But I knew on a much deeper level what I was repeating inside me had to do with love. The truth I was finally hearing about me is a truth that existed long before the pandemic began. It’s the truth that I haven’t had the space, or time, or maybe the strength, to really look at straight on.
“I CAN’T RISK EXPOSURE” has to do with my heart. It has to do with the fear of falling in love again with someone. Even though in my conscious, waking moments, this is the single thing I say I want most in this world. What my dream and so many months of isolation were gifting to me is the clarity that with every prayer I’ve sent out to meet with love, this fear of the risk of exposing my heart again to love is literally yanking each prayer back.
It feels like this: I’ve been out in a lonely little red boat, tossed about by the waves. And it’s hard and confronting. But it’s also this chance to notice what’s actually holding the boat in place. It’s like finally being able to see that there’s this rope attached to an anchor below. And in seeing it, I can begin to pull up on it, and finally start moving again.
I’ve been sitting out in this lonely little red boat for years before the pandemic, the pandemic just magnified my actual location. This enforced isolation helped me grasp where I’ve been hiding from a sense of wanting to protect myself. I had moored myself several miles off the coast of where meeting someone might be possible. I had made sure that risking love wouldn’t be an option, even as I would long and pray for a partner to finally arrive.
Episcopal Priest Cynthia Bourgeault writes, in Love Is Stronger Than Death, “Love is precisely that which calls forth the continued emergence of the beloved, that guides into being the new life, the new potentiality.”
Love is what calls forth the courage in us to allow for what’s next, for what’s new.
There’s a question I ask my soul often in meditation, “Where has my love not yet reached?” The answer sometimes arrives right then in the meditation. But other times, like waking from a dream this morning, the answer arrives when I least expect it. And I recognized it. This is a place where my love has not yet reached. This place in me that can’t risk exposure to romantic love.
For me then, letting love reach to this place in me that fears exposure to the very thing I say I want the most, it looks like this: it’s like bowing to a huge fiery dragon that has lived coiled up inside me. I see it and I acknowledge that it has been there to protect me. I feel and see and acknowledge how painful it is to lose people I have loved with my entire heart.
I could never dream of slaying this dragon. It arrived as an answered prayer long ago. A prayer I uttered no doubt in the dark, and in those moments of feeling safer as my own heart’s keeper than ever thinking of entrusting it also to someone else.
“Perhaps, all the dragons of our lives are princesses,” Rilke suggests in Love And Other Difficulties, “who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave. Perhaps, everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.”
Because I can see it now, I have this chance to love what I couldn’t before. I have this chance to see and love how human I am. How I’ve been writing these prayers to fall in love again, only to then quickly place them before the dragon for its exhale to incinerate.
Because I can see it now, I know what I can do to be beautiful and brave– I know how to help this dragon that has believed it was helping me for all these years. I can begin now to repeat a new mantra.
“I AM EXPOSED TO THE RISK OF LOVING AND BEING LOVED BECAUSE I AM ALIVE.”
I’m not going to ever ask the dragon to leave. Just as I’m not ever going to force my little red boat to land at a specific time, or place. I’m just going to repeat this new truth now, which is a deeper truth than the one I woke up repeating. And one day, it might end up giving the dragon some free time to do something other than incinerate my prayers of love. And one day, it might let my little red boat be guided by currents beneath and beyond it to the shore of some new possibility.
With only more love,
M.