A dialogue with my inner two-year-old

2 yo: Look at me. Listen to me.

Me: No. You need to listen to me. I don’t have time to deal with this now.

2 yo: (louder) Look at me. Listen to me. (Stomps foot)

Me: Listen here, I am in charge. We have to grow up. I have things I need to do, places to be. Expectations to fill. You don’t understand so just stop this and come along. Maybe later we can talk…

2 yo: NOW! NOW! NOW! (getting louder)

Me: You’re being ridiculous and stubborn. People are watching. You’re making a fool of me. Now just calm down, we’ll talk later, I promise.

2 yo: You always say that. You never do. (sits down, crosses arms) I’m not moving.

Me: Oh damn it all! I don’t have time for this. (grabs hand to start dragging her along)

2 yo: (screaming) Let go! You are hurting me!

Me: No, I’m not. If you’d just listen I wouldn’t have to drag you. You’re just being a stupid little girl. You have no idea about real life and responsibilities. I do, and life just sucks sometimes. It isn’t fair.

2 yo: (crying harder, whimpering) You’re hurting me, stop…

Me: (screaming) Oh just grow up will you!

2 yo: (whimpering) No. I just want you to listen to me.

Me: Oh go to your room! You can come out when you are ready to cooperate.

2 yo slinks back to the dark recesses of my soul. I can still hear her whimpering and sobbing. I carry that weight with me everywhere I go. It drags me down. Every once and awhile she comes out again, trying to get me to listen but I am too busy, too proud, too wounded to hear.

I think it’s time to listen and to be heard…

Making Love

“I love making love to you and how you make love to me.”

Society’s interpretation of this statement is usually sexual. If that was the case for you, I am inviting you to read the words again and re-think your first interpretation. While sexual love is amazing, it’s not the only way to love someone deeply, beautifully and with conviction. Those words can and should be defined differently for every couple, and the meaning can evolve and grow through the cycles of our lives. In a dynamic, healthy relationship those words are alive and I will share with you what they mean to me in my relationship at this moment in its growth cycle.

They mean a pilgrimage to Paris. They represent my husband’s willingness to get on an airplane, despite his fear of flying, and meet me in a very vulnerable place, with an openness to facing and working on our relationship with people he had never met.

My husband makes love to me through a willingness to sit and hear my words and be open to change, and to loving me in a different way going forward, even if it’s something outside his comfort zone and even if it means making difficult compromises.

In Paris we rediscovered our love and passion for each other and we built the foundation on which the rest of our lives will be supported. My husband showed up to do the hard work, to name our sorrows, our frustrations and our pain and in naming them, we have taken their strength away. We have released them into the Universe to make more room for love.

Making love to my husband is about listening to him when he talks, really hearing his words. It’s about finding time for laughter and fun and kissing every day, and reminding him to let things go that are no longer serving him. It’s also about giving him space to heal his own wounds and find his own forgiveness, but reminding him that throughout his journey, he is loved deeply and unconditionally. My arms and my heart will be open and ready to love him wherever he is in his process.

Paris gave us the space and the time we needed to hear each others love languages and to work out better ways to make love to each other that will be heard and understood. The more we live our lives out as if everything we do for each other is an act of making love to one another, the more connection and beauty and happiness we will find in life, in our family and in each other.

Heart Truths

Words are my solace. They are love. They are anger. They are passion, hot and cold. I find my heart in my words. I find truth in my words. Heart truths.

Heart truths are the foundations of my decisions, my choices, and my dreams. They are profound, reverberating through soul and conscience. Hard to ignore, especially once committed to ink and paper as words.

Heart truths test me, they honour me, they change me, they push me over the edge and throw me a rope to bring me back up. They abandon me and they save me. They bury me alive and dig me up as I am running out of air.

I dance with my heart truths, a primordial dance of aching drum beats and burning soul fire. Disease and neglect burn away, opening wounds, filling them, healing them, searing them with remembrance scars, lessons learned in darkness as I felt my last breath being stolen from my lungs.

Breathe fresh. Breathe anew. Let the old burn away. I wear my scars with pride. I let my heart truths ring like bells, declaring my life, my value, my mission to those who are ready to hear it.

So many walk through life ignoring their heart truths, dead to their passions, loving stuff more than life, forgetting how to live, covering their scars with shame.

Shame. It has no place in authentic living. Can I teach the world how to live authentically? Can I teach the world to shed the shackles of disease, fear and self-loathing? Can I teach the world to use all its senses again? To love the smell of dirt and rain? To open their arms and feel the warmth of the sun, the cool light of the moon? To taste the spring raindrops and the first winter snowflakes? To truly see the fractured light of a rainbow after the storm? To see the new day as a fresh start each time the sun’s rays inch over the horizon to say good morning? To smell the clean scent of food picked and eaten the same day?

I want to, but it starts small. I share this incredible enthusiasm for the world with my three-year-old and hopefully he will carry it out into the world with him and share it with someone else. I share it here in my blog, perhaps you are reading this and thinking, “Yes, that’s what I needed to hear today. I hear your heart truths speaking to mine.”

Listen to your heart truths. Listen to the whispers, they will get louder, you will hear, you will feel, you will know and you will not be able to contain it, so you will share it and pass it on.

My hope for you today is that you will wake up to your song and you will learn to sing it and you will sing it with pride and love and gusto, and others will hear your heart truths and they will wake up too.

Let’s all wake up!

Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!