It’s scary. This love thing. The sweet vulnerability of extension. The naked of ‘here I am’. The tentative reaching of outstretched arms. The wide open of hope.

We all get a little lost here. Wish we knew how to do it better. Wish it were cleaner and more gentle and a little easier to understand.

We welcome the head long rush of it just as we try to run away.

Teach me how to be loved.

We all say this over and over again, in different words or with the shift and sway of our bodies or in the silent spaces where words are left behind.

Teach me how to be loved.

Let me show you how to love me well. School me in the workings of your heart, in the language of your bones. Let my open palm memorize the shape of your face. Tell me the stories of your scars so I can trace them with the honor of understanding.

Do you see this fault line? It is where I was broken, over and over again, by the ones who came before you. Are you willing to take that in? My wide open eyes? My truth lives there, if you look for it. I have been loved by those who didn’t care to discover all that I am. Will you be the one to see me whole?

It gets tangled sometimes. The purity of beginnings become a hazy twist of expectations, the intermingling of past hurts and future fears. We are the product of all that has already been, and of all that we hope will one day become. We carry with us the bone memory of the loves that we have held and all that has been lost. We don’t ever come into love without the echo of our past singing it’s siren song.

Can we do this? Can we find in this love a gossamer thread of redemption to coax into a late night tangle of limbs and lazy Sunday mornings? Will you follow me into the interplay of light and shadow? Will you dance with me here, where the light and dark within me can mingle with the good and bad of you?

Teach me how to be loved. It is a relentless forgiveness that allows us to return here, again and again.    Past the tears and the leaving and the broken spaces. Back into the hope of more, the possibility of again.

We are made for this. For the sweet vulnerability of now, for the outreach past fear and into unknown. For the extension and unwrapping. Even for the fault lines and the bittersweet of no longer ours.

We are an ancient sort of resilient.  Made for the falling and the rising.  Made for rose colored glasses and honeyed lips and finding new home in another. Made for the burning down and rebuilding from ashes.  Made for the holy wonder of beginning again.

Teach me how to be loved.

Show me how to love you well. Our hearts speak fluent optimist even when we try to cloak the hopeful whispers in layers of pessimism masquerading as protection.

We are here to love. To speak our mother tongue to lovers who may stay or may go. To learn the body rhythms of forever and of just for now. We are here to open to the bliss and the risk and the possibility inherent in every beginning.

Teach me how to be loved.

Let me learn how to love you. Start now. I’m paying attention. I was made for this.

So were you.

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