Love Will Track Me Down

I have after much procrastination begun to reflect on time in France last May followed by hiking into Havasu Canyon with a friend in June. Part of reflecting involves reading my journal from the months following my travels. In pages and computer files I find things like this note found seconds ago:

Last Friday upon arriving in the country, I proceeded to have four glasses of champagne. At a wedding reception that may not be a lot. If you're wanting a buzzz that may be not be a lot. If you’re 110 lbs on a 5’2” frame, that's a lot. Me? I was avoiding feeling.

Now here it is Sunday evening, standing at a sink of just washed dishes, with Jerry only gone fifteen minutes and I think: I could open another bottle of champagne.

I immediately and unexpectedly hear: “Dawn, there is nothing you can do to make me stop loving you. I am like your mother. I will always love you. I will never stop loving you.”

I spent the weekend in prevention mode. I weeded the garden. Typically I call this tending, something I find deeply satisfying. In near 100 degree mid-day sun, it’s torture. I read or better conveyed I called out words as I looked at them on the page. This too I find deeply satisfying usually but not when I’m avoiding writing my own words. And I slept something that’s also usually satisfying but not when done in the name of avoidance. I was reading, weeding, drinking and sleeping all to avoid weeping.

In the past, I’ve talked with a friend about developing the capacity for sacred weeping and how the world needs people, men and women with heart, who are willing to be the alchemical vessels for sorrow in the world. At the time this idea first arose, the former president was in the White House and I considered showing up at the White House to weep for him, for what I imagined were his own unwept sorrows and all the things hidden in his shadow ofwhich he knew not.

Now I think, ‘Who was I to think I could do that for him when I’m avoiding that for myself?’

There’s something about this voice at the kitchen sink that is deeply comforting, profoundly loving. To know I am loved. That I can run to the ends of the universe and there is nowhere that Love won’t find me. Love will track me down. Love will be there even if I’m found weeding on Mars, drinking on Venus, reading on Jupiter and sleeping on some far flung Milky Way star.
Love will stalk me and patiently talk with me on my time not hers.

-Dawn! the Good News Muse - 4/23/2010