LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Maggie Doyne!

Do not cave, do not collapse

Dear Lovelets,

Many years ago now, I heard a story that amazed and dazzled me. There was a young American woman (very young, at the time — like 19 years old) named Maggie Doyne, who had read EAT PRAY LOVE, and gotten inspired to go travel the world. The book gave her the inspiration she needed to take her life’s savings of babysitting money, and instead of using it to go straight to college after high school, she set off to see what the world was, and who she was within it.

Maggie’s story is not mine to tell — she has told it so beautifully herself in her book BETWEEN THE MOUNTAIN AND THE SKY — but I will share that her tale includes (but is not limited to) her moving to Nepal, adopting fifty children before she was thirty, opening a school for hundreds more children who had been left impoverished or orphaned after a brutal civil war, starting training and recovery programs for abused women, creating health clinics in a part of the world where health care could not be found, becoming a CNN Hero of the Year, and having to face some of the most brutal and devastating losses and challenges a person could ever endure.

And now — even after having survived so much and having created so much — Maggie, like many of us, looks out upon the world with a sense of despair. It was that despair that caused her to write a letter from Love — asking her own Spirit of Unconditional Love what it had to tell her (someone who has seen more beauty and tragedy in her young life than most of us will ever see) what we are to do when the world feels like it’s crumbling.

What came through was a message that to me feels beyond simply hopeful. It feels transcendent.

I hope you will watch her video, and feel what I felt — the floating beauty and wild medicine of True Love.

Let’s keep going,
Your Lizzy

Dear Love, what do we do when it feels like the world is crumbling?

Little lover: build a new world. Immediately. In the next five seconds.

Don’t resist us, please, as we explain. And please keep your mind as wide as the widest horizon as we try to show you what is true.

You make up the world with your mind. This isn’t a corny little woo-woo notion, sweetheart. It is the actual truth. Out of a stew of molecular and energetic material, the human imagination builds worlds — inventing time and space, naming things and individuating them, building whole lifetimes, whole nations out of opinions and fantasies, holograms that your brain creates in order to make sense out of what is, in fact, nothing. Or perhaps what is, in fact, everything.

It is all a dream, my love.

You are even dreaming yourself; that’s how deep the dream goes.

The mystics and the poets you have loved forever always knew this — long before the physicists recently started confirming it. It is a fact: you are dreaming. That is what’s going on. They are dreaming, too — all the people that you see, hear, touch, sense, read about, think about, have opinions about. They are dreaming within the dream that you are dreaming of them. It’s dreams all the way down, honey. Dreams reflected on dreams, stacked upon dreams, ten dreams thick.

Remember when you were alone with Byron Katie once and you asked her, in a holy whisper, almost afraid to disturb her imperturbable calm — you leaned in, and you gestured at the world around you, and you said, “Katie, is any of this REAL?”

And she smiled at you that simple, knowing smile of hers and said, “I’ve never seen any evidence to support that it’s real, sweetheart.” (This from a woman who once accidentally put her hand in a moving blender. And who was fine with it!)

You asked, “Am I dreaming you, Katie?”

“Yes dear,” she said.

“And are you dreaming me?” you asked.

“Yes, sweetheart,” she said. “And I am so happy we are meeting in this dream.”

You said, “What do you see when you look at me?”

Her eyes filled with tears as she tried to explain. She said, “All I see when I look at you, Lizzy, are these radiant beams of light pouring out of you. I can only call you God.”

And you could see she meant it. She could see the God light in you, reflected in the mirror of her eyes.

Which was very nice, and even flattering, but then you pointed to the ketchup bottle on the table and asked (not really wanting to), “Do you also see radiant beams of God light when you look at the ketchup bottle on the table?”

“Yes, dear,” she said. “That’s all it is.”

I know this makes you want to sit down in a corner and take a handful of psychedelic mushrooms and put a blanket over your head in order to really be able to understand this — but we have told you, Lizzy, we have told you, my love, you don’t need to do that. You don’t need an altered mind to understand the nature of reality. You only need an open mind. And you have one. And an open heart.

But, yes, you asked us a question. You said, What do we do when it feels like the world is crumbling?

And we told you. Build a new world.

By which we mean this: dream a better dream. Make it BETTER, not by going to war, but by becoming an even more lucid dreamer.

Change the dream that you’re in from one in which you, the protagonist of the story you are dreaming, is terrified and demoralized, and who feels that all is gloom and doom, and who almost wants to quit being “alive” because everything feels so bleak. What a terrible dream. What an amateurish dreamer.

Change it, my love. Change it to a dream where you, the protagonist of the story, are brave, generous, kind, inspired, engaged, helpful, uplifting, and warm. Change the world, by changing the dreamer of the world.

Ask yourself what you, the dreamer in this story, can create in the next moment that is beautiful in this dream. Ask yourself what characters in the story you, the dreamer, can help, uplift, serve, delight, enjoy, feed, love, engage with. Ask yourself how you, the dreamer, can transform a moment, this very moment, into something radiant and radical and spectacular.

Remember the wild, mystical teacher you had, who used to snap her fingers in front of you when you were meditating and say, “Change! Change! Change! Change the thought! Change the scene! Change the perspective! Now! Change the world! Change the scene, change the perspective. Change, change, change!”

Because she knew that you were creating the world with every single thought, every moment, one frame at a time, one opinion at a time, based on how you see it and how you engage with it.

If you don’t believe this is true, only look at some of the worlds people create, and how vastly people’s worlds differ. Every single person you see (or believe you see) is living in their own dream, in their own perceived reality. Change your perception, change the reality, change the world.

Listen — we hear your ego objecting, wanting to say, “No, but seriously, though. That’s very nice, but look at all the terrible stuff that is going on.”

Okay, then we will simplify it for you. We will take this answer down out of the realm of the mystic, even though everything we are saying is true, and we will drop back into what your mind loves to call “reality.”

Kid, let’s break it down for you real easy, so you can get it in one. There are only two possibilities here.

Either the world is truly ending — in which case, why not choose to show up for the end of the world as the most loving and creative possible version of yourself, in order to help the most people and manifest the most beauty possible before it all crumbles? Why not?

Or the world is not ending — in which case, why not choose to show up for the continuing of the world as the most loving and creative possible version of yourself, in order to help the most number of people and manifest the most beauty possible for as long as the world thrives?

Do you see a choice here?

We do not.

We see only one path: the one of shining love and creation and engagement, no matter what.

Your instructions are simple. Look for somebody to serve, look for something to love, and create something beautiful. No matter what the apparent darkness.

Start dreaming better. Right now. Change! Change! Change! Again! Again! Again!

We love you!

Prompt

The question of the week is borrowed from our guest, Maggie Doyne, who was compelled to pose a specific question to start her letter. And it’s yet another universal one (because although it seems that we humans are hard-wired to feel the sky is falling, that feeling does seem especially prominent these days). If you’re so moved, please join me and Maggie: find a peaceful place, get still, and write this down: Dear Love, what do we do when it feels like the world is crumbling?

If you’re in a different head- and heartspace, as always, this is for you: Dear Love, what would you have me know today?