Liberation Looks Like Love

I began this year every morning saying a prayer I wrote asking for liberation, whatever it takes. When people asked me what I meant by liberation, I said I wanted to release anything and everything that blocked my awareness and experience of union with the divine. I recommitted myself to my practice of allowing, trusting, meditation, martial arts. I set out to be a better steward of my thoughts, cultivating thoughts, as the Bible advises, of what is honorable, lovely, pure, and just.

It wasn’t long, however, before liberation took the bit in its teeth and galloped off in directions I had not foreseen and would not have chosen. I discovered that this is the risk of praying a prayer that ends with “whatever it takes,” and meaning it. I’ve alluded in several posts and poems over the months to the intense and sometimes overwhelming challenges that the Universe, in all its gracious wisdom, blessed me with in direct response to my prayer. I’ll write more about those gifts in future posts perhaps, but for now I want to share what someone reflected back to me recently over a pot of tea in the garden as we watched hummingbirds and squirrels dart here and there.

I was describing how, after all the months of such intense experience, I had come to a place that to me felt like liberation. I was sort of amazed, humbled, and so grateful for everything that had happened. I was having some difficulty, however, trying to articulate what liberation means to me now, how it feels, and how I can live it. I couldn’t find the right words.

“Well,” my friend suggested, “it seems to me from what you’re saying that liberation looks like love.”

That’s it. Exactly. Liberation looks like love. It feels like love. It expresses as love. It lives as love. This is basically what all wisdom traditions teach. A Course in Miracles says that love is all encompassing and can have no opposite. Its embrace is as vast as all creation because it is the origin and the essence of all existence.

So now my prayer is a lot shorter and simpler. Just “thank you.” It is enough.

Beloved beckons
Come
I rise and answer
I am here
For you
Always