for all vulnerable and haunted hearts ::

soul stirring prompt for warrioresses:

Many of us grew up with distorted ideas of love. Lists of things we had to do to be loved. Lots of SHOULDS and thou-shalts, intense control of behavior and body and heart. Sometimes these things weren't spoken, necessarily, but through subtle messages we were taught that we weren't worthy of love unless we changed or shifted or did something.

I've returned to my voracious love of reading, lately (I haven't been able to write much :-( so what else will I do?) and recently came across something that struck me deeply.

by marion woodman

She hungers for a love she has never known, 

a love that can accept her “in all her rottenness.”

And it struck me, because isn't this it? Aren't these our deepest, hungriest, most haunting questions?

• If I were really bad, would you still love me?
• Will you still love me, even if I became, in your eyes, the worst person on earth?
• Is there anything I can do or become that would make you stop loving me? If I were fat? If I am gay? If I married outside my race? If I were atheist? If my house was always cluttered? 
• Would you love me and accept me, even if, in your eyes, I am “rotten?” 
• Even if you knew the truth about me? If you could see me?

On our journey to healing and becoming aware and awake and alive, I wonder if sometimes we become whatever or whomever it is that we were quietly raised to consider "the worst" kind of person or personality or behavior? Because that is our foundational concept of morality and truth, whether or not it is, in fact, true. If it is true at a primal level when we are five or ten or fifteen years old, that is what we intrinsically believe. Yet the hunger for love is a mad hunger; love-starvation is the strongest and most compelling kind. And only when ~ if ~ we believe in our core that we are truly loved, no matter what or who we are, will we begin to feel satisfied and to thrive.

So my prompt for you today is this: what makes you feel and believe that you are truly loved all the way-down-deep into your bones? What makes you “get it”? Do you have anyone in your life who loves you like this? Someone who sees you?

How does this make you feel?

And are you able to love yourself this way?

::
may i be to you what was all gift for me?

let me see you.
let me hold you.
let me cradle you
in my trembling.

whisperings

let me drench you with love; let me water the whole universe of you. we will plant moon gardens and grow a tribe of shimmering souls who see each other with “that sweet moon language.”

let us love and be loved, and together 
we will begin to heal the whole world,
beginning with the wild and holy earth
of ourselves.

::