Love the World, Let the World Love You

In the swirling, thick, thuggy atmospheres of hate and disdain, the proposition of loving the world and being loved by it may feel like fairytales and moonbeams on a cloudy night. Indeed, there are aspects of the world set up to actively not love us, depending on our identities, social locations, or how vulnerable where we live is to the worst effects of our changing climate. So then, how and why is it helpful to commit to loving the world and letting the world love us?

For one thing, we don’t want to shut out the people who really do love us and cheer for us and whom we love and cheer. Shuttering my heart to love’s juiciness and being wary all the time, even when that wariness is deserved and earned by a few people, is a way to sap my vibrancy and leave me thirsty.

Deciding to love the world is a choice I make repeatedly, many times a day.

And yes, honestly, sometimes I am too hurt and too tired to make that choice. Sometimes I curl in on myself around my knitting and my cup of tea and some magical writing that cocoons me for a little while, until I can feel my sap flowing again, my vibrancy returning enough to choose to love this world some more. You might say, I retreat and let the world love me. That is also true.

Love is a dance, a recognition of relationship that we want to nurture and to be nourished by, a reciprocity of care and wonderment, thankfulness and just enough spaciousness to be free and to be kindly held when any in that relationship need or want that. There is consent in love, consent that is renewed regularly but not routinely, consent that bows before the holiness of being and honors life and choice and freedom.

We are finite beings in a web of interbeing with other finite beings, although some of them have existences so long, to us, they might feel infinite, like the oceans, the mountains, the forests, the bogs, the deserts, the plains. Yet we are all changing, always, even when we might be resisting change or surprised by change’s fact of being. Love dances in part because of change, because we are not static, the world is not static, none of us who are parts of the world are static, finished, complete, done. We dance to acknowledge, accommodate, adapt with, admire, admit, and practice change. We dance to express ourselves and to receive others’ expressions, to make together expressions none of us can make alone.

Choosing to love this world and choosing to allow ourselves to be loved by this world requires courage, for it requires vulnerability and accepting both our vulnerabilities and those of others.

When we belong together, when we need one another, when we interare, we share in this life, and this means we share our weaknesses and challenges even as we share our strengths. How then shall we nurture the courage we need to choose, day after day, when there is so much evidence of hate and disdain, to love and be loved?

Dear one, I cannot answer that for you. For me, some days that choice is a weary chant, some days, flowing so easily. I do find that practice helps me and making sure there I play and co-create pleasure and generous laughter and sleep when I am tired and eat when I am hungry and drink when I thirst. I find I need to care for my whole bodymind and choose to love myself, which is, like the rest of me and this world, in progress. What helps you choose, repeatedly, to love and be loved by this world? What nurtures your courage and your hope, your juiciness and your joy?