Fruits of Labor

The last time I posted I said I would write again when I began to see the benefit of the changes I made in my life. I had sufficiently moped about the downsides of suddenly swinging my entire life into a new direction. But this time I am here to say that the good has began to sprout out of the ground works of my efforts.

With the inception of this blog, I challenged myself to learn to love. I am so calculated about and scared of love that it has fostered an emotional dam in my heart which is (was...? dare I say?) seemingly impossible for some one to breech. Don't get me wrong, I am a sweet and loving person who is passionate about many things in life. But there has seldom been a time when I have been able to properly receive and offer up meaningful and deep love. 

I have seen that my last relationship was a final effort to culbinate all I know about love and activate all the tricks up my sleeve to bring myself into coexistence another. A worthy cause, but I didn't know how to love very well and I didn't (and still don't) have many tricks to offer up. I think the reason I ended it was because I realized all of that. I realized that I needed to retreat and, like all things in life, that I needed to learn how to love before I could go out and actually do it. Go figure. 

A novel idea, but how does one do that?! How does one open up their heart to breathe in the fresh air that the fates are good enough grace it with? Well, for me, I just asked. I was raised via a down home southern baptist upbringing and through the drug haze and mind expansion of high school and college, I have retained the idea that there is something out there bigger than me. My hiking and travel supports this idea. When dangling your feet over the edge of a 700ft cliff of the western coast of Ireland and you spit into the wind and watch it swirl on forever out over the ocean... when you curse your way up a brutal mountain and sling your pack down on a peak over looking the blazing colors of a breathtaking 360 view of autumn in full, life restoring action, you can't deny the orchestration of life. 

So in that way, I challenged the universe, the world, God, whoever was listening to help out a real hard case with an ernest desire to change. And I'd say so far it is working. Simple as that. 

Of course, it is a bit more complicated, but I have just had wild revolutions one after another that seem so simple and yet are doing real work on my heart's ability to open up and just be. To accept and give. 

Things like, loving yourself is good practice for loving another person. I have a very healthy self esteem, but there is something more to loving yourself than thinking highly of yourself. You've got to be okay with the dirty, annoying, human side of yourself.

Things like, I don't have to be a persons very best friend to love on them. That I can just give them the time of day, respect them with all I have in me, and try to offer only the best I can to them in our interaction. I can walk away and never see them again in life and still have made a positive impact on them.

Things like, there are, unbelievably, men out there who are of my same breed. Suburban Georgia may not have many of them and the ones who are like me have either already run off or have stubborn plans to run off, much like own. But, they do exist!! They play guitar in the drivers seat when traffic is bad, they hike barefoot with me through mud when I forget the right shoes, they carry Buddha in their luggage and treat all people like I remember the bible saying Jesus treated folks. Maybe just one exists, maybe I will meet more on the trail. Still, this is massively inspiring and relieving.

In the end, I am just wanting to love people all the way from Georgia to Maine and leave on their hearts the memory of my own. Suddenly, I am feeling more prepared to do this!