LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Liana Finck!

The great becoming

Dearest Lovelets!

Sometimes I look at the subtitle of EAT PRAY LOVE and marvel at its audacity: “A woman’s search for everything across Italy, India, and Indonesia.”

Check out the forceful demand of that word: EVERYTHING.

Everything?

Everything is a lot of things!

But that’s what I wanted. I wanted food and sex and experiences and God and beauty and answers to every single one of my most burning questions. I wanted to come home from my adventure with EVERYTHING all tied up in a neat bundle, solved and settled and digested and understood.

Because that is what it feels like to be 35 years old. Or at least, that’s what it felt like to me.

My life was a gnawing hunger and I wanted it all filled to bursting with EVERYTHING.

But I am becoming something else now, as I age.

I am changing.

And so, I suspect, are you. Because the one thing life refuses to be is static. Like it or not, changes will come upon us — some that are blessedly welcome and even fought for, and others that feel like biblical plagues of nonstop punishment. Who has not felt at times of incredible good fortune, “Why am I deserving of all this blessing and abundance?” And who has not wanted to shout up to the sky at times when everything is going wrong, “And THIS, too? Seriously? YOU EXPECT ME TO HANDLE THIS, TOO?”

How do we move through the ever-changing chapters of our life with grace, learning how to roll with both the blessings and the apparent curses?

And having survived everything that has happened to us thus far (both the welcome and unwelcome fates) who do we become next?

Our special guest this week is the exquisitely gifted cartoonist and author

Liana Finck

who drew and wrote her letter from Love as a sort of cry to the universe, a request that she be shown who and what she is now, ever since she became a mother and everything changed. Liana has graced us with an original drawing — and as it happens, one of her great talents is distilling complex emotions into her own wonderful style of deceptively straightforward drawings. I mean, look:

So has everything changed for you recently?

If so, what are you becoming?

Are you confused?

Are you excited?

Are you ready to ask Unconditional Love for guidance on the next chapter of your life?

Let’s do this thing.

Love,

Your Lizzy

Dear Love, who am I becoming?

Did you just hear my deep ancient chuckle of satisfaction, my dear?

I love this question!

Let me tell you who you are becoming.

You are becoming a swamp witch, a cacklingly happy mystic living alone in a cave who eats nuts by the handful; a bald love monk; an age-spotted master artist who is confident in her craft; a woods-walker; a tree branch of the divine; a seeker who is charmed by God but unafraid of her; an explorer of silence and solitude; an absolute failure at everything that traditional culture dictates would make a woman “good” — but most of all, my lover of birds and rain, you are becoming a FRIEND.

You spent the first half of your life trying to figure out how to get love, and you will spend the second half of your life giving love away. Not in a romantic sense — you’ve done that, and you’re done with it. You’ve had enough of the games of romantic love for ten lifetimes, and every atom of your being is like, seriously, BASTA with that. Basta.

Trust that feeling of NO MORE.

Trust it.

Don’t let anyone question or seduce it out of you — you know what you know. You cannot afford any longer to pour all your love into one person and then demand that they give back to you what you yourself gave away.  We don’t have time for that anymore. You don’t have time or space or patience for that anymore.

Lizzy, you are becoming a friend.

A friend to your friends, most of all, whom you cherish beyond words. But that is not all. Friend to the world. Friend to animals. Friend to strangers. Friend to the weather. Friend to your work, which you respect enough now so much (at last) that you safeguard and protect it with all your power from any intrusion or distraction, no matter how enticing.

(For you know the truth. Once you heard an author say, “You can love your books, sure, but they can’t love you back,” and you smiled your little quiet private swamp-witch smile for you knew that he was wrong, or rather that he had not experienced what you had experienced alone in your deep, reverent silence: everything you have ever created loves you back, with the fullness of a thousand trumpeting angels.)

So, yes: friend to your work.

But here are the two things you are most becoming: a friend to yourself, and a friend to fate.

Meaning, you are dropping all arguments against yourself (you will no longer accept it — any voice from within you that attacks her, you) and you are also dropping all arguments about reality. For what is friendship but a willingness to accept things exactly as they are, and to not pick a fight?

I have said to you many times in meditation recently that I don’t want you arguing against anything that occurs. And yes, I said anything. I have told you, also, not to ask anything of the world or of anyone beyond what has been freely given.

“Don’t ask for anything more,” I have said to you many times of late — and your gnarled little swamp witch heart beams in recognition of this divine wisdom, for you know that the first half of your life was about getting everything you could get, and trying to change everything that could be changed (and even, much to your consternation and frustration, everything that could not be changed, which is most things).

You know that your slogan used to be: more, more, more.

No more.

No more MORE.

You are becoming the one who can sit in her cave and spin her stories; who can take only what is given; who is a friend to any stranger who comes near; who is willing to save her energy from fighting in order to tap into the much, much deeper and more fascinating spirit of allowing; who watches the sky with fading eyes in unattached curiosity about what will happen next; and who does not need to be the thing that happens anymore — but rather the amused, friendly witness to it all.

That is who you are becoming.

Stick with me. Let’s grow old together.

This is the good part.

Prompt

Are you in a state of transition? Are you becoming something else, either noticeably (that is to say, rapidly) or over the course of years? We might as well ask: are you a sentient, living human being? Yes? Then you are changing! So why not join me this week in asking this question: Dear Love, who am I becoming? Or you can use the prompt Liana used: Dear Love, remind me: who am I again?

Can’t wait to hear the answers in the comments this week!