Embrace Love

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with a suggestion: do not wish for love or yearn for love. Instead, look around you and welcome it.

For me, at least, there is no other way to believe in a world moving forward. If I wait for the good, I simply will not notice when it comes, because the wide profile of the bad will obscure it. Too long I have scraped by and turned inward, nursed a variety of alienations, resented the obvious need for acts of giving. At every turn, I have let ugliness get the better of me, let it turn me away from relationships, society, the world.

I cannot force extroversion upon myself, but I can and must acknowledge that I need others, and that needing them necessitates loving them, and giving of myself to them without expectation of a return. This giving will never be fully reciprocated by 100% of its beneficiaries, but love is about appreciation, not expectation, and if you do not give, as a natural response to appreciating someone, how can you really be said to appreciate them at all?

The only reasonable expectation of others is that they should be beautiful. And there is beauty in all of us if only we look.

Find it.

Appreciate it.

Love it.

And shrug your way through the rest.

Thank you, goddess of love, for the love that can spring from me, if I simply make the effort to allow it.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee