Pavement

I find that love – like nature – has a way of breaking through if left to its own devices. Delicate little wisps of plants can flourish in even the tiniest cracks that open in the pavement which blankets the land.  The old roots of patient trees stretch slowly shaking off the sidewalk above them.  Climbing vines weaving their way up whatever happens to be before them on their persistent ascent skyward into the light. 

That gentleness overcoming the seemingly solid every time.

Water carves its way through the landscapes it moves through yielding to the order and texture of the natural world.  The porous stones wearing away before the rising sheers of granite as the river winds its way through the land.  But with patience, with gentleness and with time all paths are available to water. 

All stones yield.  

I feel like love – big L love – what the Greeks called agape – is similarly strong in its softness.  Even the hardest situations we face in our lives hold a path forward that will unfold in response to our surrender, our gentleness, but will close around us impassible if we try to push our way through by force. 

Love is both peaceful and powerful.

In nature, the impulse is always towards change and growth and evolution and fluidity – all qualities that we see as new shoots spring from the stumps of old trees and the seeds of long dead flowers that flourish just alongside the highway because that is where they happened to land.  Carried by the wind they do not question.  They simply grow.  And therein lies the challenge.  To simply and gently love.  Always.  Despite the difficulties we face and the rough terrain of circumstances that may rise up around us. 

We can still choose.  

Our essential nature moves always towards love.  Towards seeing the good in others.  The light in the darkness.  The potential in the pavement where it crumbles and falls away leaving room for growth and for earth again.  To keep our hearts from hardening under the weight of all that is broken in us and in others is where our work lies.  Sometimes as firmly as we try to wall ourselves off from the world it can overtake us, like the riotous new life that bursts open in spring.  That inherent connection, that reverence.

We are wired for love and connection.  It is our natural impulse to reach out to those around us.  To overcome those things that separate us.  It is what keeps us human.  The desire for connection and community and creation.  We are all creators here.  We can decide to grow soft and strong in the moments we find ourselves and fight to flourish or we can pout at having been left to rise up from the pavement in which so many other things manage to grow.  The circumstances do not have to be perfect to reach out. 

To connect.  To comfort.  To change.

It is our nature to love.  It is all of the other stuff we have bought into that gets in the way.  There is a certain grace in putting it all down – all the reasons we cannot or should not be loving – and to proceed with the same gentle power with which water dissolves the obstacles in its path as it journeys to the sea. 

We are only here for an instant. 

Better then to become what we might be if we too could surrender and allow our true nature to take hold. 

Trusting that what is meant for us will meet us there.