What Love Looks Like – Part One

I have had the joy of knowing love. It has been the perfect counterbalance to when love wasn’t known.

There are people from who love should flow. Mothers. Mothers are the most likely place from where love should flow. But what if it doesn’t? What if you don’t ever experience the love of a mother? Does that shape you forever? And can the love that you find or seek out though life make up for that loss? I know that I spent my youth seeking love like a drunk in search of bottle. I staggered my way through so many wrong choices and blindly continued to make the same wrong choices over and over. And when I drank  that poison I thought was ‘love’ I found I could never quite get the buzz I was seeking. But I drank it and drank it over and over again until I blacked out in my heart.

I was absent from my own life for so many years because I sought love in all the wrong places, in all the wrong people, at all the wrong times, and for all the wrong reasons. And I didn’t think for one minute to seek it in me. And I certainly didn’t know that I could actually find it there or that I had to find it there first before I could find it anywhere else.
Who teaches us that we have value? Who teaches us that we matter? Would a mother have taught me that? Perhaps a mother that believed those things about herself or knew love for herself , perhaps that mother could have taught me that. But my mother didn’t. She did not have that ability or inclination or maybe even the basic grasp of making her children feel like they were valuable and worthy. My mother taught me to be absent. She taught me that I couldn’t count on her or anyone else. She taught me that being empty was okay. But she couldn’t help it. She was seeking love herself without a clue where to find it.

Love can make us or break us. If we are waiting for love from someone else to make us then it is guaranteed that love will break us. I have watched it break my brothers, one by one, they have fallen like bricks from a wall, broken edges, missing pieces, and no mortar to hold them. They are leaving this life with no children, failed jobs, and failed relationships. When they are all dead it will be like they never existed except for  the memories that my sister and I carry. And when we are gone we will take those memories with us and what will be left of my brothers will just be smoke.  They waited for love to make them. They waited and waited and found disappointment over and over. And their seeking led them to drugs and alcohol and sickness and death. But not once did they look inside to find love. They didn’t know how. They hadn’t been shown that trail. And the brambles and thorns of self-loathing and shame slowly covered that trail until it could never be seen again.

My older sister found her salvation and recovery from drugs in her religion. Her belief taught her that she was lovable, loved, loving. What a parent could not give her she found in the words of a man long dead but still alive in so many ways. He became her guardian and showed her a way to find love inside her own soul, to see that she was worthy of the most important love there is, love of your own self. It sounds selfish to love your own self, but it’s not. There are so many times in life where having love for yourself is the only thing that will save you. In fact it might be the ONLY thing that can save you.

Art has helped me find my love of self. Creating things, painting, writing, photography, preparing beautiful food, and sharing it. Creating things has touched a quiet, hidden place inside me and nudged it awake. Creating things reminds me that I too am a creation. I might be a creation of an all loving Father that sits in Heaven or I might be the creation of a cosmic mad scientist that has poured out the stars and galaxies in a beautiful experiment. I might be a figment my own imagination or a figment of yours. No matter, I would still be a creation and a mighty interesting one at that. It’s a leap of faith no matter which way I jump. Art is the reminder that when I spend time creating something and feeling peaceful and inquisitive all at the same time, I am being true to myself and in being true to myself I find love waiting. And I find love all around me because I recognize it’s face.

What love looks like is me.

And now that I can see it in me, I see it everywhere.