“The holiest of all the spots on Earth is where an ancient hatred has become a present love.”

This line from A Course in Miracles is a stand-out from a cursory glance at a Cliff’s Notes version of the text I have scanned several times in the last two weeks.

If that doesn’t seem to you like a sound investment in my spirit – or even a financial win against the cost of the primer – you’re correct.

I frequently sell myself short.

There’s no good reason.  Truth told, there might be a thousand reasons, but none is adequate.

This riddle has been my constant companion for any number of years – 26.49 to be exact, almost to the day.  It’s my own personal school-yard bully I keep in my back pocket, just on the off chance I go easy on myself for a minute or two.

Here’s the thing: I love people, all kinds of people.  I love life.  I’m not so sure I have ever actually fully lived, save a few precious moments after life-altering experiences that tend to include travel and out-of-the-box pauses, reality checks of sorts.

Here’s the other thing: I really love myself.  I love what I’m about, who I am at core – not my behavior or anything false on the surface.  I know, see and appreciate my heart.  I come from and revel in and wish for the world just one thing: love.  Knowing I am part of something much greater that is eternal and True makes me enormously, enormously happy.

Yet.

The disconnect for me has always been a conundrum, the unsolvable puzzle.

I trip over myself to make people comfortable, to see them in the spiritual sense.  I see you.  It matters that you live.

I enthusiastically cling to the Zulu tenet that we indeed bring one another into existence.  This miracle happens through another miracle, the ability the see oneself in another, and to see in all beings, including ourselves, the stuff of God almighty.

Just today at work I made my own heart glad by receiving and embracing friends old and new whom I stumbled upon in the heart of our home, the kitchen.

The miracle of the connections that brought us together is another, very relevant, part of the story.  For now, suffice to say I was beyond ecstatic to see and embrace and begin to know these new siblings of the Universe.

The same inevitable cloud of ecstasy is known to hover around and through me when I see a child at work who offers a hug, when a just-right conversation with a grieving or worried parent happens and I know beyond a doubt that the just-right-ness has not a single thing to do with me except that I have used my gifts to carry a message crafted by some much larger messenger.  In short, it was just right, and it wasn’t even remotely about me.  I simply had the honor, the true blessing, of delivering the telegram.

Daily, sometimes hourly or even moment by moment, I gleefully fall into a river of eternity.  And, yes, it all comes down to love.  It is an undeserved, incomprehensible gift.

And yet.

And yet.

And yet.

I have spent the last few moons exploring the gap.

I’m told there’s a formula for climbing out of the gap.  God knows I love a formula.

It’s a pie in three parts: body, reason and emotion.  Too great an emphasis on any one part creates imbalance.  I will skip the analysis and cut to the chase.  My body mind is almost non-existent, and my rational mind is a super-gigantic force the likes of which the retro television hero Letter-man can barely leap in a single bound.  Emotion mind isn’t doing so hot.

They say the correct balance of focus brings the Earth-bound joy known as wise mind.

It seems a fair enough goal.  I get it.  Sometimes I actually employ this parachute during the free falls of life.  Other times not so much.  As with most things and most people, it’s a mix.

Increasingly, however, the quest for the ever-elusive balance necessary for the implementation of wise mind strikes me as not enough.

That’s right, I said it.  Wise mind ain’t all that.  Balanced living ain’t all that.  Even our old friend wisdom falls short.

Why?  These things are two-dimensional.  They are human.  They simply are not enough.

They have some validity.  They are of what Richard Rohr calls “the first half of life.”

They are something.  They contain truth and even wisdom, but they are not themselves alone Truth.  They are not everything.

There’s a difference.

What’s the alternative?

Transcendence, I think.  Scratch that.  Transcendence.  I know.

Enter love.

Tonight something changed.  I am different.  A switch was turned on. If I could think of another trite turn of phrase to describe it, I’d sure use it.

Trying to explain it is pointless.

What I can say for sure is it’s a commencement, not an ending.  I have entered the second half of life.

Mind you, I have just one big toe inside the door and plenty of real estate in my old head space.  Yet.  And yet.  There’s enough spirit (on loan from the Universe and not of me) in this new place that the molecules of the air are new and fresh, and it won’t ever be the same old me again.

I cannot breathe or think or feel in the same way.  I’m a different kind of being.

I have begun.

To live.  To fully love.  To finally see all of it in its completeness, including myself.  [<– That’s the shift, for the record.]  Me.  Mit.

As of this moment, I live fully in love.  And by that I do not mean I am or ever will be perfect or that my life will move forward without bumps and bruises and the occasional crisis.  By that, instead, I mean that whatever happens, how I see it, how it is experienced, is simply different.  My shades have groovy new lenses.

Miracles abound.

They really do.  Just today I saw a post on Facebook that caught my attention.  My cousin, a creative and independent soul, found reunion.  This is the same cousin with whom I found connection through wayfaring strangers while in a little village in the highlands of Guatemala some 23 years ago when I was feeling very distant from family.  Details don’t matter.  GF is back home, in the Universal sense.

Score one for the Good.

Also today a guy I have encountered at xyz work events through the years appeared in my small-u universe with his beautiful wife and their friend, whom I met a few years ago when her best friend bought a house, which only happened because I was in a neighborhood on a specific day cheerleading for the Good and happened to meet two women who shared a message, delivered by us on behalf of the Universe, to a woman who would later find she needed it and would bring said friend to help in the process.  And all this previously stated history happened in the presence of the guy I just saw and heard today in a real way for the very first time.  Again, the details don’t matter.

Miracles abound.

Why not then add a third miracle to the day?

No details.  They are not the point.

Here’s a sign of late I will share, however.  This is pretty neat.

For the last several months I have been reminded by the Universe of the significance of my birth.  By that I do not mean that I, Mitzi, or my Earthly ego is important.

I mean that about once a day, sometimes more and sometimes less, I encounter the numbers of the day of my birth.  Most often I happen to glance at a clock at 8:27.  It happens a lot.

Another time there were 827 messages in my inbox.  There are other examples.

The point is it happens nearly every day in some way.  What is consistent is the message.  Mit, I see you. It matters that you live.  Only I’m not the person speaking it.

I mean come on – it’s my birth date for crying out loud.

The birth-date thing is kind of a pre-quake tremor leading up to today’s new beginning.  It has been in the works for a while – 44.9 years to be exact.  (8/27 is almost here.)

It’s another reunion.  I’m returning to what I have always been and always known.

It all comes down to love.

That line – ^^that one right there – is from a song by India Arie.

She’s right, too.  Her pronouncement is the same Eternal message in its own unique and beautiful tongue that has been spoken by prophets and sung by sages for eons, since the very start.

and we all want the same things,

health, love, prosperity and peace,

tolerance is the seed,

and the gift of pure acceptance is the tree

Someone once told me to try to see myself as God sees me.

That nothing can bring you peace but yourself.

There is no beginning too small.

Start where you are.

And we are all.

Love.

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Thank you, Universe.   ❤

Love, Mit

© Mitzi Viola, 8/24/13