When Love Stretches

Cultivating a wider reach of heart and mind

Last month, we experienced yet another loss in our family. This time, it was our dog, Sophie, who for the last twelve and a half years brought an abundance of full-bodied, exuberant joy and love and no small amount of loyal companionship into our lives.

There was never quite enough gravity to hold her down as she ran, pounced into snowbanks, leapt to catch frisbees and balls, jumped off the pier into the lake. . . . And then, having spent all her energy, she was the sweetest snuggler, taking up more than her share of the bed or the couch. She gave us two-plus bonus months after receiving a terminal diagnosis in March, and a few weeks ago, after one last short walk in the park, we said goodbye to her in our backyard. She passed peacefully in the grass, nestled against my leg, while my fingers felt her pulse slow and finally stop and we cried buckets of tears.

In the weeks that followed, no longer structured around Sophie’s needs for medications and special diets and shortened walks and lengthened naps, my days opened into a free fall through an unwanted spaciousness. I felt the cumulative grief of other losses, personal and collective, from the past six months, and in an unusual move for me, I lost my appetite for words. Instead, I craved silence and time to walk (alone now, without Sophie), to sleep, to read, to practice tai ji. Mostly, to pause, and, as my somatic teachers remind me, to digest the losses of the past year and the grief they stirred.

(Why is it so hard for me to remember what I’ve written here and elsewhere and told so many thresholders before — that pausing in the middle of great change is the most important thing we can “do”?)

More than once, and as recently last night, I’ve named in conversation that this past year has changed me in ways I don’t yet understand and patiently wait to discover. But I am beginning to get a glimpse. And here is one thing that I’ve learned that brings a welcome, if challenging, new perspective.

I’ve learned how love unlaces the heart and yearns to move through it in ever widening circles. How, like a drop of water falling into a pond, love is meant to ripple outward and to carry us with it, as it grows.

Image by qimono from Pixabay

This might not seem like a radical revelation, but for me, when I follow the ripples outward, I realize how narrowly I’ve sometimes fenced my love. As if it might run away on me. Or run out in its supply. And it can be tempting, in the throes of grief, to believe love must be held close and guarded, as if one might avoid new losses and prevent grief’s return by being more careful about where and how to parse out one’s love.

But loss and grief are inescapable, and love is meant to jump the fence and run. That’s part of what it does. It sweeps us out beyond the perimeter of our grief and fears and egos, stretching our hearts into a wider reach and joy.

Sophie was always good about coming back when we called her. But in her younger highest energy years, sometimes when she was off leash in our front yard she would take off on a runabout; she just had to stretch her legs and race as fast as her heart and lungs allowed. She’d disappear through the neighbors’ yard and run for five minutes — who knows where — before returning from the opposite direction to sit down at our feet and look up, panting and full of life, and joy, and unconditional love.

I see now, that every game of fetch was not only about the ball. It was a chance for her to chase after freedom and the sheer pleasure of her muscles and heart pumping hard, then bounding back to eagerly drop her joy and her loyalty at my feet along with the ball I’d thrown across the field.

What if I regarded my own heart’s love that way? Am I willing to let it run unleashed, to trust it to return? Can I let it ripple out, as it is wont to do, to make a wider circle of my awareness and my care? This, I think, is what happened here in the Twin Cities last winter when federal agents occupied our streets and “neighboring” became a powerful verb of relationship and mutual aid and protection that circled around people we had not known before but discovered were deeply connected to our hearts and lives. Though first and foremost, it was a time of terror and violence, in the midst of all that, many of us also experienced the deep joy of unleashing our love and finding ourselves in a vibrant, wider circle of life and relationship.

The threats to our community and neighbors, here and elsewhere, and to democracy itself, remain. And I’m not suggesting for a moment there is or will be a happy ending, now or in the near future. But I am learning to keep my heart open a little wider. To let my love run a little wilder. To know that freedom at its best is paired with loyalty and relationship, sometimes beyond what we now know and name.

As the summer solstice nears and we, in the north, experience lengthened daylight, I wonder where your heart and your love might be running free and returning to you with exuberant joy and connection. What encounters are enlivening you in this season of sunlight and greening, of blossom and fruit, of leisure and labor and laughter and love?

Take good care, friends. May you give your heart enough room to roam.

Karen (and Sophie)