Clear Water

Love Like a River

“Water in its clear softness fills whatever hole it finds. It is not skeptical or distrusting. It does not say, this gully is too deep or that field is too open.”
Mark Nepo (The Book of Awakening)

Last week, we had one day in which rain poured down in torrents. My dogs wouldn’t go outside to do their business because there was standing water in the back yard. It flowed across my carport and under the basement door. I ran for towels to catch it before the basement flooded. I thought about the people along the Missouri River, and the Mississippi, whose homes and fields flooded last year due to record snowfall up stream. They must have felt sad and scared as they watched their livelihood covered by the muddy, fast-flowing river water. Water can tear lives apart; can wash away the evidence of a life’s work, can drown and destroy. But water is also essential.

Water is what we look for when we send space ships to other planets and moons. Is there water there? Has there ever been water there? We know that without water, there is no possibility of life. Mark Nepo compares water to love—it covers everything, it does not pick and choose. It is necessary and life giving. There is one difference; love is not destructive. I hear a collective ‘oh, yes it is!’ out there from everyone who has ever loved and lost; who has tasted love’s sweetness only to have it ripped away by circumstance or death. I didn’t say love never hurts—often love hurts more than anything, but it does not harm.

Clarification: it is not love, but the things we do in the name of love that are sometimes harmful. For instance, holding on too closely out of fear of losing, giving up one’s own life in order to accommodate another’s, supporting an addiction because we don’t want to hurt our love, and staying when we know that going would serve life. Those things backfire in time. They are great killers of love. Sometimes love means letting go, giving up, and walking away. Sometimes love is served by saying, ‘no more.’

Like water, love in its clear form is life saving, essential. We thrive in the presence of caring, sharing, and supportive relationships. Like water, love absorbed produces growth. Without it, we dry up like a desert riverbed. Who would choose to never know love in order to avoid pain? Instead, we want it to flow like water, unobstructed, clear and unconditional. I hope your day is full and overflowing.

In the spirit,
Jane