Love is the greatest fortune.
You will not amass it.
You are it.
~Ingrid

“The moment you have  in your heart this extraordinary thing  called love
and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it,
you will discover that for you the world is transformed.”
~Krishnamurti

Love Your Life

And a voice will come from the stillness
to give these words: Love your life.
You will know from its deep urging
to let go the well-worn list
of all you thought you first needed.
Begin here, freely,
from this muddy place.
It doesn’t matter if you are broken,
empty-handed, shabby.
Go now, into the day:
the open fields, markets,
the long trail to the sea.
Find all the ways
a lover loves the Beloved:
each hidden bloom, unspoken wound,
vagary of heart.
Become a brave and willing traveler
in a wild, forgotten terrain ~
a world of intimate tender relating,
infinite mystery, un-tethered joy.
Now, moving in this world, you know
that love is the greatest fortune.
Only, you will not amass it:
you are it.

~Ingrid Goff-Maidoff

(Often, when I am still enough, I feel words dropped into my being that are messages to ponder.  The other day I received the words, “Love your Life,” and felt quite instantly that this didn’t mean I was meant to list with gratitude everything I felt was going rightly for me, or, conversely, to list everything I still felt was necessary before I could love my life, but that I was being asked to love my life as if it were my beloved.  I was being urged to love my life as a lover would love- not as an end-point receiver of all good things, but as an intimate partner, a loving participant.  I was being asked to approach my life with curiosity, pleasure, appreciation, forgiveness, compassion, playfulness, awe- to love as a lover in the deepest sense of the word. I realize that to receive this guidance is one thing- to live by it is a lifetime of practice, remembrance, forgetting…. remembrance… forgetting…and remembering!)