love + love = love

This weekend, I attended a reunion of friends from camp that recently re-connected in the virtual world of Facebook. Most of us had not seen each other for over 35 years. Three of us went for a walk around the old camp site. For 6 weeks each summer, that place was our whole lives, where dreams were made and lived, loves were found or lost, and nothing mattered more. The heightened sense of reality we lived with then -- the feeling of no past and future but only those 6 weeks -- those moments on the edge of our lives, came flooding back. Since Sunday, many of those memories have seemed more real to me than my present life. I have caught myself mentally walking down memory lane while physically walking my daughter to school; the siren call of a rose-colored past, and thoughts of what the reconnection with people from that past can mean to my present, is so alluring. How might these connections shape me today and tomorrow?

I received help sorting through it all from an amazing dharma talk by yoga teacher Jillian Pransky. She asked us -- "isn't it miraculous how quickly we can fall in love?" She was talking about this in the context of how quickly we fall in love with a baby, and the worries and fears that can accompany that love, and the importance of staying open to all of life's possibilities -- but it resonated with me. In the summer of 1973, I fell in love so quickly with a boy, with a place, and with what it meant to be in that place and with that boy. And walking through that place 35 years later was to relive that love -- to have it feel so real and so relevant and so present. Love can knock you off of your feet. To feel so much love for all I have in my present life, and to add to that love I had in the past, is almost more miracles than I can bear. A piece of me starts to contract and shy away in fear. But as I tell my daughters, the heart has an infinite capacity to love. Feeling love can never detract from feeling love. All we can do is try to keep our balance and stay open to the question, "what next?"