I knew it…then I forgot it. Then I knew it again…only to forget it when life got complicated. Which it always seems to do.

Long ago I heard and read and was told that the opposite of Love is Fear, not hate. We cannot love when we are in fear.

One by one I unmasked my fears through the long and arduous process of writing a memoir. I described the traumas of my early life. Yet at the end I proposed them a blessing. Then finally, in my fifties, I was able to experience the blessing in the wound. And to say that “Betrayal is sacred when the heart can encompass the whole.”

By then I had traveled full circle, north, south, east and west, chronicling, delving, seeking answers. The answers came about through the act of writing, another word for delving. If you are me.

And now, nearly at the end of Part Two, the follow up memoir, I can say that Love is Really All There Is.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. 

The word love is bandied around a lot, that single precious word a stand-in for different degrees and types of love. Perhaps we know what we mean more specifically when we mention opening the heart. For now, even if we don’t know it, we are talking about the subtle energy body. Something that is usually sensed or felt more than seen. But if we know it’s there we can visualize the heart chakra. This is what has opened. So we can feel more. And through feeling more, know more.

We feel the heart opening when we are in love, but lately I have been feeling a new and different openness through grief. When my ex-husband Michael suddenly became incapacitated six weeks ago, my sorrow was enough to wipe out all the residual, hard-to-let-go-of, resentments I had been clinging to. In the blink of an eye I saw them for what they were, disappointments of the personality, having nothing to do with our relationship on a soul level.

This is the truth that has come home to me as I have watched his mind and body get weaker. It matters little now who was right and who was wrong, or who misled who. Yet while I grieve that we are losing him, I find there is also space for rejoicing. Rejoicing that we knew one another, had a son together, and many years of happiness. These are the memories I am filled with now. Now that my heart has opened again…