Flowers in the Manure Pile

I don’t want to be the person you can’t live without. I want to be the person who reminds you that you are alive. 

The deeper I move into love, the more I realize that the truest form of it seeks the good of the other person. Not their comfort or their prosperity; not their ease or their external happiness. Their good. Love keeps no record of wrongs. Not because it buries its head in the sand and hides, or because it naively continues to allow repeated bad behaviour, but because it sees the mistakes as growing experiences, or symptoms of deeper issues and requests change. It isn’t the inconvenience that drives this confrontation, it’s the knowledge that the relationship cannot progress past this point without it. If one party stops growing, content to wallow in the muck and mire of stunted emotions, there is no new adventure. 

Mature confrontation also reveals the person one is, rather that expounding on all they are not. The truest self in any of us is who we are at the level of spirit. The sharing of Source places us all on an equal footing. Equally supported, seen, heard, and in essence, imagined by our Universal Maker. I strongly believe healing is much simpler when this belief is there, though I realize that this is the point in my discourse where some will leave me. However, this premise may cause a return: True Love looks at a person who is in the middle of the mess and divides the experience from the individual. It is able to look, much like a groom recalls the beauty of the woman behind the veil at a wedding ceremony, recall, and verbally affirm the beauty. Humans tend to act how they feel, picking up old habits or using old responses or coping mechanisms based on wound memory. Temporarily we feel we have created a place where we matter as much as we want to, because we are doing whatever we choose. However, as we mature, engaging in selfish behaviour only serves to make us feel worse about ourselves. Generally we give ourselves a berating making it unnecessary for someone else to step in and take up the baton. 

What we need is the mud washed off, the mirror held up, and the insistent “look at yourself” presented. You, are stunning, lovely, strong, capable, utterly cherished, of untarnished beauty. You so reflect the light that you make it look good. Love recounts the times you accurately reflected your Maker, and asks how it can help you do it again. Love remembers who you always have been, and declares you “good.” If it confronts behaviour it does so in a way that stresses that you are not low, the poor conduct is beneath you. It also lends enough strength to help you discover your own so that healing can begin. It doesn’t drop a truth bomb and run (although, there are some circumstances, like abusive relationships, where I might advise the running, as staying around can be self destructive, or at the very least, enabling). 

The base instinct is self preservation when we don’t know who we are. We hold onto the things we have accumulated, the “doing” that declares our individuality. We identify ourselves with our roles and accomplishments. Our culture reinforces this: jobs are awarded on credentials, loans on credit scores, marks on work, success on visible display of wealth. While track record should affect our material output potential, and sometimes it places limits on our level of impact, it should never dictate how valuable one finds themselves. 

Who we are is intrinsic. Our value bestowed. Circumstances do not dictate character, or potential. The Course is not charted by the mistakes we make, though the path may spring from that point. The most beautiful plants are grown in dirt and manure. Not because they took on the shape and form of their soil, but because they pulled the nutrients out of what was decaying and BLOOMED anyway. They bowed to what had been bestowed on them, not what they found most tangible. 

True love reminds the one beloved that they are the seed they are. It will not tolerate the mask of poor behaviour. It will not tolerate the stench of old, rotting wounds that constantly declare the incapability of change. Love does not sit on the sidelines and watch one self implode. And it should never be asked to. It may for a time, appear distant while someone goes through a process and finds health, but it does not actually retreat. 

I used to believe that I needed someone who couldn’t live without me. I needed to be needed that badly. I also used to believe that when I had messed up, I needed to wallow in the nastiness of that feeling, and label myself useless and unlovely. I used to think repentance and guilty feelings followed each other around, and there needed to be an emotional incapacity to function until something wrong had been dealt with. That is penance. Love does not require penance. Love requires freedom of movement uninhibited by the wrong perceptions I have about myself. If I believe the Truth about me, from the Mouth of the One who is Truth, I will also believe, by default, the Truth about you. And because I Love you, and Love rejoices in the Truth, I will tell you what I see. And it will only be difficult to hear until you believe it. I don’t want to be the person you can’t live without. I want to be the person who reminds you that you are alive.

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