What if Love Were All?

   (...I awoke from sleep, and in that sleep were the constant dreams I fear I have lost, the hopes I once held that may never come true, that niggle at the heart, injecting the seeping poisons of regret and sorrow in place of passion and strength, an acid that erodes the strength of the organ to pump the very life force that gave rise to those hopes and dreams in the first place...

   ...and in the middling place twixt dreams and life, my conscious mind swooped forward like a warrior, crying out these words.)

   

What If Love Were All?

What if it was only love? What if I loved all of life? What if I loved the dreams deferred and the deferment itself as much as I loved the dreams that I had won? What if I cherished all that I had lost, not in a wallowing way, but simply as a matter of fact? What if love were all? I could love my fears as greatly as I could love my possibilities. I could love my flaws and all the ways I get in the way of my dreams as much as I love those places where I have transformed, broken through, succeeded, achieved. I could love my body in pieces as well as a whole. I could love those people who drive me crazy as much as the people who give me no trouble at all. I could love the broken hearts and the wonder. I could love the trash and the plastic and the muck and the smog and I could love the stars and the aurora borealis and the gardens and the wide, broad landscape before me, be it city or sea, land forever or sky.What if it was all love, misnamed, misunderstood? What if it wasn't love that killed but I found a way to love anyway, not the kind of love of the sickness of a mind, but the kind of love that loved through the pain to a deeper wisdom, the kind of wisdom that existed before we messed it up, before there was anything to mess up? 

What on earth would the world look like then?

I cannot conceive of such a wonder.

But since I have spent a lifetime pushing forward out of my groveling fear, I am willing to shoot my arrow into that new aspiration, that which surpasses all other dreams, and, in so doing, consumes them and renders true what is and renders forgotten what never was in the first place.

What if- love- were all?

Erin Muir
October 11th, 2015