Marriage and Love and Iowa

So I traveled to Iowa to see my old coworker/friend get married. Of course, every time I mention that I'm going to Iowa, I got "um...Iowa? What's in Iowa?" LOL. After a while, it became a running gag. Anyway...

The days leading up to the wedding were not without stress...the cake, the dresses, doing the junior bridesmaid's hair (never before have I EVER met someone so tender headed - she is worse than my niece), y'know, typical pre wedding issues. But there was no bridezilla here, no obtuse or unreasonable groom...the two people getting married were just as happy as they wanted to be...and even though there was a lot of prep work put into place to make sure that things were 'perfect', they would have been just as happy getting married in a burlap bag in the middle of a corn field. (And, for the record, there are MANY corn fields in Iowa.)

This is the kind of love that I want. Or at least, what I said I wanted until recently. Now, don't worry, I'm not becoming miserably cynical or anything like that. But after hearing a passage from this book, I'm sort of reevaluating love and what we all think about what it is.

At a brunch I catered recently, there was some down time, and the host invited me to join the group discussion. Now, I'm not one to mix and mingle when I'm working, so I kind of worked and listened at the same time (I didn't want to be rude, she HAD asked me to join the discussion), and I'm glad I did. One of the books that one of the guests was talking about was The Mastery of Love by Don Miguel Ruiz. In the chapter "The Track of Love, The Track of Fear", Ruiz talks about love having no conditions, whereas fear is rife with conditions. He notes: "Love is unconditional. Fear is full of conditions. In the track of fear, I love you if you let me control you, if you are good to me, if you fit into the image I make for you. I create an image of the way you should be, and because you are not and never will be the image, I judge you because of that, and find you guilty. Many times I even feel ashamed of you because you are not what I want you to be. If you don't fit that image I create, you embarrass me, you annoy me, I have no patience at all with you. I am just pretending kindness. In the track of love, there is no if, there are no conditions. I love you for no reason, and you are free to be the way you are."

In this journey that I've been taking recently, I've come to learn a lot about myself and who I am. In that, I've learned that my definition of love has evolved drastically. More on that in my next blog...

Posted in: