Fielder's Choice

A Course in Miracles teaches that there are two forces at work that govern everything that is.  Those forces are love and fear, and that between the two, only love is real.  Most of my posts on this blog, and most of my thoughts, have shared the underlying theme of a search for love.  I have lamented and agonized over not finding the love to save me from my solitude.  In truth, God given love has been there all along.


As a Christian, part of my core belief is that I am a child of God, created in His perfect image.  God is love.  Therefore, the love I thought I was searching for had been an integral part of who I am all along.  I only lacked the faith to believe it was so.


Even though the love was in me, I did not choose to see it.  Instead, I sought love from external sources.  I tried  to get people to love me by contingently loving them.  It didn't work.  I found a host of women who would let me invest my love interest in them right up to the point that I felt entitled to reciprocation, then they no longer wanted anything to do with me.  These were poorly chosen women, and I was not so much investing with love as I was acting from fear.


I have spent so much of my energy addressing the love that I perceived to be lacking that I espoused myself to the fear of perpetual loneliness.  Loneliness became an identity, and I permitted it to become a crisis.  The more effort I put toward fighting loneliness, the more lonely I felt.  My way wasn't working.


Through collaboration with my therapists and dear friends Vickie and Kerry, and through the study of the words of Wayne Dyer and Marianne Williamson; through the meditative guidance of my dear friend Cynthia, and with sincere prayer to God, I have found a way to get back on track.  I have divorced myself from my loneliness and begun to concentrate on my internal and infinite source of divine love. 


From the age of about nine years, the Holy Spirit has shown me my role of a crisis manager and as a blessed peacemaker.  From that same age, I was involuntarily disconnected from an investment in my own self-assurance.  I lacked that self-assurance until I met and befriended Craig.  Craig challenged me and made me realize that my only choice was success by way of confidence.  His own confidence was and continues to be infectious.  I did become confident in our professional and intellectual collaborations.  Personal confidence would prove harder to come by. 


In 2007, I bottomed out emotionally, and began seeking the assistance provided by a therapist in September.  I would work with Vickie for nearly five years, until she took leave from her practice.  Vickie reintroduced me to my own spectrum of emotion, and helped me to process feelings, some of which had been dead to me for over 25 years.  Vickie and I accomplished a tremendous amount of healing and restoration in our sessions together.  When Vickie took leave from her practice I felt a great sense of loss.  That person I could trust with everything was gone away.  I bottomed out again. 


Around that same time I invested trust in some people who were still finding their own way, and who were in a position where they were able only to receive an investment of love, because their path also needed some redirection.  My openness to giving was received eagerly but not reciprocated.  The situation devolved to a point where everyone involved realized I was being at first unconsciously, then quite deliberately, used by this newfound circle of friends.


At the same time, I began seeing a new therapist, Kerry.  Kerry would prove to be every bit the blessing that Vickie had been, but it took me some time to figure that out, and to reinvest the same level of trust that I had entrusted in Vickie, and then into those opportunistic friends.  I had good and bad results from trusting people; and, although the good far outweighed the bad, the bad had been the most recent.  As a result, I reverted to being guarded and defensive, and looked to start rebuilding some of my walls.  I blew the mistakes others made out of proportion, especially so with Kerry.  When Kerry saw my weakness, she pulled me closer, when those other friends pushed me away.  In the last several months, Kerry has really earned my hard won trust when many would have given up on me, and when I have wanted, on more than one occasion, to give up on myself.


Kerry has helped me arrive at a point on my journey where I honestly believe that there is nothing inherently wrong with me.  I am ready to let go of the familiarity and identity that is the fear of loneliness.  Letting go of that loneliness creates a huge opening of emotional space. 


The number one benefit of the increased emotional space is that it allows me to love more freely.  Another benefit is that this openness allows me to draw my reinvestment of love from source blessings other than others whom I used as more of a buffer from fear than as any source of true love.  It may come by way of photography, or music appreciation, or from writing on this blog, or sending correspondence through the mail.  I feel like I am finally open to allowing my success to find me in due course, rather than trying to chase it down and extrapolate it on my own terms. 


The book of Ecclesiastes says there is a time to sow and a time to reap.  Until recently, I was so caught up in the harvest that wasn't right there, right then, that I forgot to ever plant the seeds.


"This Hard Land", Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.

Home Field Advantage

Home is wherever love allows you to remain.


For most of my adult life I have been looking for my place in this world.  Generally, it has seemed like an exhausting and never-ending search to find a place where I belong - where I can set down roots and establish the man that I am.  It never occurred to me that during the entire course of my journey, I was already living in the Kingdom of God.


I have been working from home!


It has been my nature in my adult relationships to be a source of empathy and encouragement.  I did this, mostly, because I want people to feel good and positive about themselves; but, I also did it to try, I guess, to lay claim to someplace in their life that I could call my own. 


I was searching for a home.


I moved awkwardly among social and professional and familial scenes, all the while offering the best of my encouraging and empathic abilities in each place.  I  compartmentalized the different areas of my life, never allowing one place to overlap or even to touch the next.  My life, as a result, became very disconnected.  It largely remains so, even as of this writing, but I have begun fixing that. 


I have been looking for a home.


Lately, I have achieved a greater awareness of a general regard for a sense of place, and a specific regard to my place therein.  All of the good deed doing and encouragement and empathy that I had been offering were being intended as means to the selfish end of personal gain.  I was looking so self-centeredly to see what I could get out of God's way, that I couldn't get out of my own way on the path to love and peace and happiness.  I have been looking so hard to take residence in an individual home, that I couldn't see that the Holy Spirit has endowed me with such measure of blessing that the loving intentions of the entire Kingdom of God have been invested to take residence within me.  That is a concept that is, at once, amazing and incredibly humbling. 


I already possess the foundation for a home.


In the last two months I have learned that two very dear friends will be moving far away from my native Baltimore.  My number one travel partner, wing man, and hang out buddy, Chris Heard, will be relocating to Washington State in late June.  My friend from my days in photo school, Isabell Triemer, will be returning to her native Germany on June 10.  Of course, I will miss seeing them here.  Until very recently, I would have counted these departures as loss.  Both Chris and Isabell have demonstrated to me that the love I shared has been beneficial to them.  For much of the time that I have known both of them, my giving was done in the hopes of getting something in return.  Their perceiving my role in their lives as something of value is not the easiest thing for me to wrap my head around, but I'm am certainly blessed that they feel that way. 


I am creating a home.


I came into this particular phase of my life with a dearth of self-confidence.  I prayed to God for the ability to forgive those who had been the target of my repressed anger.  He granted that miracle.  I also prayed for him to bless my friends and family, and to find a way to use me as a tool to accomplish His will.  Apparently, He has granted that miracle, too.  The Kingdom of God is within me. 


I am at home.


Every encounter I have with every person I meet offers me the ability to take the Light of God's will in a new direction.  I have spent too much time looking for recognition and validation from peers, a girlfriend, the art community, and such.  I should have been seeking only the Kingdom of God.  The Bible says, "Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.".  So, when those whom God has given me the joy and blessing to love move on to far away places, I do not count it as loss.  I count it as God continuing to answer my prayer to use me as a tool to accomplish His will, so that His Light that I have shared with them can be taken to more places and shared with more people in an ever-increasing reach of His love.


I am adding onto my home!


"Homeward Bound", Simon & Garfunkel.