What’s important?  That’s the most important question.  What’s important?  At this point in my life, when I am well into the second half of my life, what is most important for me is love.  Not so plain and not so simple, love.
What is it and how do we do it?
The question is that simple.
What is love really all about and what keeps us from doing it well?

My bookshelf is full of books about love. In one way or another, each one is about love.  They may say they are about writing, movement, psychology or poetry and somehow they all explore an aspect of love and loving ourselves enough to write, move, speak and live more authentically.
Most of the work I’ve done in my life has been, and continues to be about love.  What is different now is I finally realize that is what my life is about.

I started dancing on my first day of college and fell in love.  In the tiny dance studio at Lake Erie College I began a process of discovering what it was like to lose my ego and find my self.  I used to say I got lost in movement.  What I know is through dancing I began to find a way back to my self.  It was the beginning of a very long journey of learning to love my self.  I am still on the path.  What is different after all these years is I have made a choice to be on that path.  That journey is what’s most important to me, to understand what love is for me and to share those discoveries with others in ways that help all of us live with more compassion and freedom.

I have studied all sorts of things on this path to love.  Laban Movement Analysis helped me begin to understand how we hold our selves back from loving in a multitude of ways and dimensions. The Alexander Technique revealed that letting go is a path to love.  Gestalt psychotherapy taught me how to make real contact through being with my self in ways that support and care for my deeper needs. The Enneagram reveals in detail what love is in its essence and paths to be love. Waldorf education and anthroposophical teachings have shown me how to love and nurture what wants to be born in children.

I started a blog entitled Love Lessons several years ago after my sister Cindy died.  I followed Cindy into this life and was with her when she died.  I am who I am in large part because of who she was and the impact she had on me.  She was born two years before me with Down Syndrome and was known as Cindy Love.  That is how she signed her cards.  She got the words mixed up every time she signed her name and coincidentally, revealed the truth of who she was.  Cindy expressed authentic, abandoned and unconditional love.  She was love.  Cindy was unaware of the fact that she was different or special.  She was simply, Cindy Love.

These writings have been an attempt to share some of her profound teachings about love, that she taught with the innocence of a child.  I come full circle, having spent my entire life seeking to understand, through various forms of study what it means to love oneself and others and now realize it is with and through the simplest ways of being that we understand and embody love.

With the innocence of a child for over 50 years Cindy revealed what T.S. Eliot meant when he said;

“We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

I continue to learn and seek and grow and want to share what is important with you in the hopes you will share with me and others what is important for you.

With love,

melody