Love

The previous entry --the lyrics to The Rose--speaks about the facets of love. This song has always moved me and I really cannot explain why--it just resounds in my soul as if I 'know' it on a deeper, untapped level.
It reminded me too of the most important lesson I have learned in life about love. This is a personal thing so bear with me.

Once I found myself falling in love with someone other than my husband. It wasn't another man nor was it a homosexual love but I experienced intense feelings of love for this person unlike any I had ever felt before. It wasn't the same as the love I had felt for my husband but it was just as intense and it scared the crap (pardon me) out of me at the time.

You see, I grew up in an alcoholic household and one of the myths I had been taught was that you can only love your immediate family and if you strayed outside of that boundary then you were in dangerous territory. I remember it was so bad that when I did fall in love with my husband an attempt was made to guilt me out of the relationship and that scarred me for many years and affected my relationship with the parent that tried to keep me from marrying him. I have always claimed that I could have brought home Jesus Christ Himself and He would have been rejected.
But I digress.....

Obviously I ignored the attempt to prevent me from marrying the man I loved but not without emotional fallout. And so later when I entered into an adult friendship unlike any I had ever experienced I was overwhelmed with my emotions and felt as if I was actually cheating on my husband even though in truth--I wasn't. I reverted to my old "stinkin thinkin" and told mysef I was wrong to feeling this way about a friend. I had never loved a friend before--I didn't know what that meant but once I became an independent adult with adult freedom to choose whom I wanted to interact with then the flood gates opened and I was swept along. What was normal for many others was strange and scary to me.

So I went to my spiritual director at the time who happend to be my first principal I taught under and a Catholic nun. I confessed my feelings to her and expected that she would admonish me about loving another and that she would sort of slap my wrist and tell me to get a grip. Well she did tell me to get a grip but not in the way I expected and the session I spent with her that day as we talked this over was one of those watershed moments of my life. She explained to me that in my lifetime I will fall in love with many people--men and women that I encounter as I journey on. Some will be close to me physically and some will be from a distance. Some will be able to respond and enter into the dance of a relationship while others would not. But no matter what, the feelings of love I would feel would be good and normal.

As she explained it to me those walls that my alcoholic, toxic and boundary making background had established came tumbling down and it felt like I was released from a prison I didn't even know I had been in. Of course she told me to be careful and prayerful about relationships but not to be afraid of expressing love and feeling love. And that in my life I would fall in love many times.
To hear this from a nun--a celibate woman-- was astounding.

And so I gained a deeper understanding about love and have indeed found myself falling in love with various beings as I have journeyed on. Not everyone can understand how I can love a story character as intensely as I do--meaning Frodo. He is just one of the ones I have encountered. The love I feel for him is as swift as a river flowing love; as intense as I feel for my husband and yet as different too. And Frodo is just one of a line of 'beings' I have loved over the years--he just happens to reside in the pages of a book.

As I approach my fiftieth year I reflect on those times I have fallen in love and rejoice at what I have gained from each experience and each one. I won't make a laundry list of all of them but I am indeed grateful for the love I developed with the friend that sparked the whole thing for me and of course for that amazing celibate woman who taught me more about the true nature of love than any other I have encountered.

So for anyone who happens to stumble upon this rambling discourse and never has been led down the wrong path of understanding as I was this might seem incredibly simplistic. Love is love-- plain and simple. I am so glad I learned that when I needed to most of all.