Everything I Need To Know About Love, I Learned From My Pets....

Like I said yesterday, I'm delving into my issues with food, and trying to fix the real problem in my life. This is going to take a long time. I'm using "When Food is Food & Love is Love" By Geneen Roth. At the end of the program, she read the following peice, that made me bawl, each time I listened to it. And I'm not very emotional.

For me, I don't feel like I deserve love. This comes from a past of physical, and mental abuse from those I thought loved me, the men in my life. I turned to food, and I still do to this day, but I'm working on it. It's hard.

I often wonder, why it is that I am so connected with animals. I know the obvious is that they love unconditionally, and they do not hurt me, and the definately won't abandon me. I treat my pets better than most people treat their children. Anyone who knows me, can attest to that. They are a source of constant love and forgiveness. In this book, she read an excerpt from another one of her books "The Craggy Hole In My Heart and The Cat Who Fixed it" It's 'written by' her cat, Blanche, the day before his memorial service. It spoke to my heart, as I can hear any one of my pets saying these words to me:

You cannot see me splayed in the sun room looking as if I am surfing on a wave of light. You cannot see me lapping up the dripping water in the bathtub,
curled on the couch in the TV room, or snoring in the laundry basket.

This deceives you into believing I am not here.
But you're only looking with your physical eyes
Look again.

Look with the eyes beneath your eyes, the quivering life beneath what you call your life. As you are beginning to discover, it's what you can see with those eyes, that is most compelling.

It's time to begin living the shimmery, glimmery, sun-lit life you gave me, but havn't let yourself fully inhabit.

Everyone knows I had a better life and death than most people on the planet.
Between the acupuncturists, and the psychics; between being hand-fed and carried everywhere, having mice heads to eat, dogs to chase, fences to jump, and corn on the cob to nibble on, there was nothing the physical world didn't offer for my pleasure.

And who wouldn't want a death like mine; carried around in a cashmere snuggly, touched sweetly until my last breath with a zen preist, and a pearly godmother chanting softly beside me.

All that was good, but the pleasures of the physical world; jeweled collars and sparkly necklaces, white downy blankets and dried salmon flakes, were not the real treasure.

It was the love.
It was always the love.

It was the fact that you delighted every time you saw me. Every time for seventeen and a half years I knew, that just by walking into a room, your heart would fling out streamers of joy.

So I kept walking, so that your heart could keep flinging.
And I kept putting my paws on your face, so that your body could keep relaxing.
And I kept purring, so you would know there was safety in this world.
But it wasn't me, anymore than it was the jeweled collars.

It was you.
It was always you.

You use to mistake the symbol of the treasure, for the treasure.
The marker for the thing itself. The gift from God, for God.
As if all you could possibly hope for, was a thing you could touch.
A token, rather than all of shining existance.
Since you hadn't let yourself know that shimmering fully, you kept turning to what reminded you of it; glitter, and baubles, and sparkles.
As if having those, was having the real thing.
As if that was the best you could do.

It was time for me to go. I told you I would stay until you were strong enough to live without me, and I did. And you are. Until your heart spread like dragonfly wings, until you didn't need me to know you had a heart. As long as I was in the pysical body you relied on me. You believed I was the locus of that love.

Now you can find out for yourself, what is true.
Do not greive for me, I am in a place where tuna fish juice flows like water. Where I can jump like the wind, and every place is silky, and sunny.

If you must, greive for what you wont allow yourself to have.
Grieve for all the ways you separate yourself from this radience.
From laying down in a patch of sun at 2:00 on any old day, and from knowing you are beloved, on this earth.

It really made me realize, that while I see myself as un-loveable, and un-loving, it simply isn't true. I show my pets such love, and it comes back to me through them. They have taught me without my realizing it, that it is ok to love. And ok to trust. The connection we share, is out of the love that I am able to give. I am not really hiding, like I thought I was.

It's what Oprah would call an "Ah-Ha" moment.