Love Beyond Love...from a Place Beyond All Understanding

Santa Fe, New Mexico

As I hang up the phone from talking to my six-year-old daughter, who will be making her first visit to see me in Santa Fe today, my memory tape rewinds back nearly a decade...

It’s September 1996 and I have just moved to the small Ontario town of Penetanguishene, a few hours north of Toronto on the shores of Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay. I’m living in a one-bedroom granny flat that I’ve rented from a young couple with a nine-year-old son named Jeremy.

I’m barely moved in before Jeremy adopts me and claims me as his.

Having had few friends at his age and no younger siblings, I don’t know what to do with him or his attachment.

More importantly, I don’t know what do with the feelings he awakens in me as, in that unconsciously methodical way kids have, he quickly drives a wedge into my closed heart.

My heart opens because of him...in spite of me.

Somehow, without either of us knowing it, he is preparing me for the parenthood I never anticipate experiencing.

Now, nine and a half years later, I have a child of my own — a radiantly beautiful daughter, a daughter who loves me more than it sometimes feels as though I can bear.

If her birth and, five years later, the end of full-time parenthood with the end my marriage, stretched my ability to love to new levels, the days leading up to this weekend visit are stretching my ability to receive love.

Like Jeremy, yet even more so because she’s of my blood, Guinevere is forcing open my heart to its next level. Like Jeremy, yet even more so, she is forcing me to accept and experience the unconditional love only a young child can offer.

Through this simple, brief phone call, I realize I have never felt her love for me as fully as I do in this moment.

Yet as priceless a gift as that is, she has given me an even greater one. As full and complete, as broad and unconditional, as deep and abiding as is the love I feel from her in her excitement to see me, what is being opened within me is greater still.

All religious and spiritual leaders talk about God’s love, of the love of Spirit, of how beyond any conception of human love that is, of how our call is to open and be the vessel into which that love is poured.

What I have experienced with Guinevere these past few days of phone calls leading up to today’s visit is a piece of that.

Even as I feel it from her, there are moments when it’s difficult to accept, when it’s hard to receive.

Yet if I can’t receive the love of my child, how can I accept the love that is even greater...the love from which all flows?

What holds me back?

What holds any of us back when love comes knocking on the door of our beingness and we choose not to hear it? When we choose not to open the door to see and receive it?

What holds us back is our fear. Love is the ultimate tool of transformation, the absolute force for change, the central key to our freedom.

Parts of us would prefer the enslavement of the known to the risks of the unknowable. Parts of us would rather not be free, would rather feel unworthy of all that love would bring.

As wondrous as is the love of a partner, mate or spouse, this love transcends that, for it transcends the limiting emotions of our humanity.

It carries a frequency so pure and unsullied that it can only be transmitted by a child or by that which is not embodied, by that which we choose to call God, or Higher/Divine Self, or soul or spirit.

As I accept the love of my child, I also accept God’s love — that love beyond love from that place beyond all understanding. And as I accept that, I am able to receive all the Go(o)d carried on that love, whatever form it takes.

When we talk about claiming our birthright to abundance or activating our heart’s desire, what we’re really talking about is opening ourselves fully to the pure love of the universe, to the infinite love of our higher/spirit self, to the eternal love from which all is formed and upon which all is carried.

It’s one of the miracles of the universe that simply by allowing myself to more fully receive my daughter’s love, I open to all the riches and richness of life’s potential

And as I free myself to receive that love, my ability to return, share and spread it is then multiplied, multiplied and multiplied again

Today may be three days after Valentine’s day for everyone else, but it’s definitely Valentine’s Day for me.