Nine: Love

Some days I feel more lovable than others. Some days other people seem more lovable than others. Some days love is just plain difficult. It's on these days that we need love all the more. 

I have no idea how my husband has done it. By "it" I mean loving me all these years. When we met I was an incredibly broken person, in body, mind and spirit. He helped put me back together. He's stuck with me through mental illness, emotional ups and downs, miscarriages, and diagnosis after diagnosis. He's loved me at a size 8 and a size 24 and every size in between. He has loved me, truly, in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad. He loves me exactly the way I am, right here and now, just as much as he loved me exactly how I was with a functioning body and a not-so-addled mind. I've loved him all the while as well, but I suspect I've had an easier go of it.

It seems that the more I talk to people about love, the more I realize they think love is something you have or your don't, or that you're in or you're not. But it's not. Love is a living thing. It needs to be nurtured with understanding, tenderness, and forgiveness and grown with time, attention, and communication. 

Some days it comes easily, and some days it takes work. If you don't tend to it, it may wither, but if you cultivate it day by day, it can grow into something wondrous. 

Today, I intend, to cultivate love in all my relationships; to love when it's easy, and to love when it seems impossible; to not just feel love, but to express it to others; to carry love with me in all my interactions; to love myself. 

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Forty Days In Thought, Word, and Deed