The Gift of Love

Memories can be healing. They allow us to pause within perfect moments to feel their continued resonance.

In the midst of the holiday season, I’ve been reflecting on recent moments that have altered me. 

It’s less about taking inventory and more about acknowledging and cherishing the feelings and revelations that now walk with me within memory.

Each memory is its own gift. Two emerge within an expanding sense of love.

My breath caught as I witnessed a tender gesture between mother and daughter at the end of our Utah trip this past June. 

Reaching for her mother’s shoulders, and with a tone softer and more open than on the day she’d arrived, Megan shared with her mother what the past week had meant to her. 

Smiling from deep within, she admitted,

“My heart broke open in a way it hasn't been for years. Joy, delight, love...are helping me crawl out of the swamp that I've been in. What sticks with me is the layers in the (canyon) rock. Keeping that in my thoughts as I move through life. Choosing to honor each layer of myself, even the messy ones, and growing from there.”

Months before, Megan’s mother had recognized her daughter’s growing need for a break from raising little ones and running her own business, all intensified during COVID. She invited her to unplug on the river with Honest Heart Journeys. 

Doing this, she also had the rare gift of witnessing her daughter’s gentle, joyous emergence that week.

This tender exchange between mother and daughter is a gift to me. It's an assurance of transformation. A reminder of the precious journey my own daughter and I have navigated. And a promise for other relationships that I quietly cherish within our community. 

At the heart of perhaps my most personal memory this year is impersonal love.

This autumn, I spent a solo week in Ojai, California. Cocooned within a workshop setting with total strangers, I felt as pure and unfiltered a presence of love as I’ve ever felt. 

I experienced with Byron Katie a constant, adoring, unapologetic, childlike love.

We weren’t in the workshop just to sit in the presence of love, though; we were given invitations to give and receive it ourselves – to hold space for ourselves and others, without ego, personal stories, or at times, even knowing each other’s names!

One evening, the facilitators took our group through a profound, silent exchange of deep, trusting connection.

I’ll never forget how I felt that evening – nor the questions that surfaced about how I express love with those I’ve known forever. 

I’ll also never forget the moment two days later when a young woman came up to me in the courtyard during a break. 

“I want to thank you,” she said. “The other night, you looked at me the way I wish my mother would.”