Unfold Your Wings and Watch Life Take Off

Part 2 - Your Potential

Your Potential Leads To The Discovery Of True Love

What is love? We talk incessantly about love. We watch films about love. We read about love. We dream about love. We pine after love. But how many of us really know love? How many of us can hold our hand up and say "I have discovered true love?" I suspect very few.

True love is not dependant on being with a particular person. It exists beyond the need to have a particular person as the object of our affections. True love is a spiritual state in which everything is appreciated as being sacred and worthy of our veneration.

Living a guided life helps us reach this state. It is a state with which you are already familiar. Do you remember how the world appeared when you were a child? Every day was filled with wonder. Do you remember the time you played for hours fascinated by a simple colourful stone? Do you remember the time you lay in the long grass and gazed aimlessly at passing clouds above? Do you remember rolling down a hill with your friends to see who would reach the bottom first? When you were a child the world seemed a place full of marvel and wonder, a special place where every day held new promise and new discoveries. When you were a child you were in love with life.

How a child feels the world is very close to the state of true love I am talking about. You may also have touched on this state as an adult. Maybe when on a camping holiday you decided to rise at 5 am and saw the sun rise over a silvery, still lake. For a moment, just for a moment, you stepped out of your normal everyday world of goals, targets, disputes and struggles and became lost in the beauty of a precious gift - today. Maybe that experience touched your heart and you realised that life has a meaning beyond the mundane. Nature is an expression of love. When we are deeply touched by nature's beauty then we are beginning to discover true love.

By following our calling we are constantly challenged to expand the circle of our love. Starting with our immediate family, our love and commitment to serve others expands to embrace our neighbours, our local community and humanity at large, eventually embracing everything that lives and grows. As we explore our potential, we move from less love to more love, from narrow love to expanded love. This growth of love, expressed as a hunger to serve, attracts challenges and trials that strengthen our character and helps us mature. We realise that by travelling this journey, we learn to have higher and more all-embracing visions and ideals. Meeting the challenge to ground these visions and ideals in the world around us is the only path to happiness, because these challenges and trials bring our buried fears, doubts, prejudices and anger to the surface where they can be released.

As we are healed we find it easier to appreciate, find wonder in, and fall in love with every day. In this state of love and appreciation we no longer have to chase after happiness because it permeates our daily experience.

Envoi

I am blessed.
A new day is dawning.
The sun is rising beyond the trees,
Mirrored in the lake's still water.
All is quiet.
All is still.
The orange ball is reflected in the gently rippling water.

I forget my worries.
I forget my troubles.
I am faced with the dawn.
In the city I could not see it.
In the midst of my woes I did not value it.
In my hectic schedule I did not look for it.
In the end I forgot about it.
But now I have fallen in love with today
And gratitude penetrates my preoccupations.

Now, just for this moment, I am fully alive.
Now, just for this moment, I am in love with life.