Unconditional Love

       Unconditional Love:  When I saw this subject-heading on an email from Catia, a fellow teacher, I expected familiar-sounding words of encouragement nudging me toward higher love and deeper spirituality.  Unprepared for the delight that awaited me, I laughed out loud in recognition, as I read, and took great comfort in this affirmation of the human condition.

       According to Catia, this refreshing piece of writing was authored and shared on Facebook by Courtney A. Walsh. 

       "Dear Human:  You've got it allllll wrong.  You didn't come here to master unconditional love.  That is where you came from and where you'll return.

       "You came here to learn personal love.  Universal love.  Messy love.  Sweaty love.  Crazy love.  Broken love.  Whole love.  Infused with divinity.  Lived through the grace of stumbling. Demonstrated through the beauty of…messing up.  Often.

       "You didn't come here to be perfect.  You already are.  You came here to be gorgeously human.  Flawed and fabulous.  And then to rise again into remembering.

       "But unconditional love?  Stop telling that story.  Love, in truth, doesn't need ANY other adjectives.  It doesn't require modifiers.  It doesn't require the condition of perfection.  It only asks that you show up.  And do your best.  That you stay present and feel fully.

       "That you shine and fly and laugh and cry and hurt and heal and fall and get back up and play and work and live and die as YOU.  It's enough.  It's Plenty."

       Love, then, is not a tightrope we walk.  It's a wide and open field, in which we play – and learn.