LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Uncle Pappy!

Let's dance

Dear Lovelets!

For many of you out there, the holiday season is beginning, and some of you will be celebrating Thanksgiving this week — with all its joys and/or complications.

So Margaret and I are sending you a special gift this week: Uncle Pappy.

Uncle Pappy is the relative we all sort of wish we could have at our dinner table. He has developed a following on social media for the joyful, impromptu, earthy messages of positivity and love that he dispatches to the world from his pond, where he likes to float about in cheerful meditation. (Also, please take special note of the way he pronounces pond. We love it.)

For those of you who might need an extra dose of avuncular positivity and fun this week, we offer you the homespun wisdom of Uncle Pappy — please enjoy!

And let us ask Unconditional Love this week what “positivity” actually means — and what it does not mean. So many treasures to find, I believe, in this question.

Have a beautiful week, everyone. We love you over here!

Dear Love, what will you have me know about staying positive?

HA HA HA HA HA, oh we love this one! What fun. Thank you for asking!

We love it when we get to let you in on top state secrets, so here is one:

Positivity is not the opposite of negativity.

You never knew that, did you? If you think of it that way — if you think of it as binary, where positivity and negativity are constantly struggling for power — you will always be out there setting yourself in opposition to something, and that’s war, and we are all about the end of war.

True positivity — the real stuff, the good stuff, the world-altering energy of light, the powerful alchemical attitude-magic that changes everything — actually accepts, welcomes, and INCLUDES negativity.

True positivity looks negativity in the eye, understands and embraces the reality of it, and says: Okay, you get to be here too.

This is what darkness cannot do. Darkness cannot include light. Darkness is only ever darkness. But the light of positivity embraces everything just as it is — even the darkness — and is never in a war against reality.

You already get this, we know, because you have lived it. You’ve just never heard it named before so clearly. But let us give you an example. Would you like to know the most positive moment of your life so far? We are delighted to share it — it’s our favorite moment of your whole life so far.

It was the summer of 2017 and your life had somehow turned into a nightmare again. You were going through yet another divorce, and the woman you had left your husband for, the love of your life, Rayya, was dying of cancer — but that wasn’t even the awfulest part. The awfulest part was that she had returned to active drug addiction, and had become vicious, manipulative, and abusive to you — imagine it: Rayya, abusing you! The person you loved and trusted above all others.

Your home had become basically a crack house, and that wasn’t even the worst of it; the landlord of your beautiful apartment sent you a letter saying that you had to move immediately, because he was selling the place. And now you had to figure out how in the world you were going to move your furious, paranoid, cocaine-addled hospice patient to a new apartment, when, actually, she might die at any moment. And then your bank account got hacked, and all your money disappeared.

Remember that day? Sleep deprived, frantic with anxiety, running out of solutions, heartbroken, and it felt like the world was raining down hammers.

Remember how you went for a walk to get away from her, to get away from the situation, and then something said to you: Now PRAY.

And right there on Sixth Street you obeyed. You opened your mouth to pray and the wildest prayer of your life came out. You said to the God of your understanding:

Make it worse.

And you meant it. And you knew, and we knew, exactly what you meant by that.

You said “make it worse” because you knew there was some kind of incredibly important lesson for you in all this darkness, but you just couldn’t find it yet. You KNEW, though. You knew that if you saw this situation in the correct light, you would see that it was all just a construct engineered to help you evolve and awaken, that there was, in fact, a treasure waiting for you at the bottom of all this horror — a treasure of incalculable value.

Because you know: there always is one. There always is a gift.

But you couldn’t find it yet because you were still being rolled by the tidal wave, just trying to breathe, just trying to survive.

You said to God, “Make it worse.” You said, “Take the gloves off. If you’re trying to destroy something in me that needs to die, really do it. Grind me under your heel and turn me to dust. Just finish the job — because I want to CHANGE. I want to get it. I can’t see yet what my part is in all of this dysfunction, or what needs to change. So don’t hold back. Make it worse! Show me.”

My love, that was the most positive moment of your life so far.

Because this was a moment when you faced life on life’s terms; stopped trying to change and control the external circumstances in order to make things more comfortable for yourself; refused to beg for things to improve to be the way you wanted them; and said to the universe you were ready to see truth and CHANGE.

All the while, you were not only accepting the darkness and negativity that was around you, but asking for more of it — if more was indeed what was needed to transform you and awaken you.

This isn’t the cheerful, airbrushed positivity that your culture taught you, which is all based in a denial of pain, and pretending that hard things aren’t real. The positivity you expressed that day in a burst of autonomous joy — weirdly — was a recognition of the pain that is an essential part of the Earth School curriculum, without which you cannot be forged into the new. That positivity was an embrace of life in all its dimensions. That’s the spirit that says: Bring it, let’s dance.

And God obliged, and brought it. And things got worse, and then they got worse again, before you finally did have the awakening you had prayed for — until you finally saw your part in all of it.

Things had to get so much darker before you could see and name and take responsibility for your own dysfunction, your own mental illness, your own codependency, your own love addiction, your own learned helplessness. At which point, once you saw it, you could take that same ferocious positivity forward into the decision to change, to really change, to grow, to evolve, and to take full accountability for your own life. Which you did, and which you have done, and which you continue to do.

And we cheer!

And we still cheer!

Never stop looking for the offering of love that is buried inside every apparent nightmare. Never stop looking for the gift, the treasure, the beauty, the invitation for awakening and freedom.

Love is not always soft and snuggly, or soggy — love is sometimes ferocious with its power to roll you in the surf for a while and demand that you find your strength by finding your way back to sunlight and air. And if you can’t find it in that moment, ask God to make it worse until you CAN find it.

Never lose that shining courage. This, our dear human, is what it actually means to be a positive person.

Let’s dance.

Let’s keep dancing.

We love you.

Prompt

Would you like to join me in reflecting on what it means to be positive — and maybe how to reframe some aspects of our Earth School experience that, on their face, don’t seem like the stuff of a good life? This week, let’s pose this question: Dear Love, what would you have me know about positivity?

Are you in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Hobart, Adelaide, or Auckland? Would you like to be? With me? In February perhaps? Well, have I got news for you! I am gearing up to be in all those places in just a couple of months — more info and tickets HERE!