Love's Great Lungs

God knows more about relationships than we do. The ones that She makes are not the tense and fragile relationships that pepper the world. They are bigger than a ballroom. They don’t depend on moods or distance. Love binds us together unbreakably. Not silly romantic love. Real love that is the cement of the universe. The love that ties the stars together. The love that places snowflakes softly on the glacial sides of the most violent mountain. This love that sits in the coldest depths of outer space, un-phased, loving, warm. This is the love that makes our relationships. If we will only let it.

This love blows us up big like a balloon. We feel the breath of Love blowing into us and feel, “Oh my God, life is beautiful!” We have never felt anything like it. We are convinced of the love of Love. We know that somehow the universe has great mines of love, great veins of love, the most powerful, succulent stuff. We rest.

But then the breath of love comes again and again, unsuspected and bold, and we cry out, “This is too much! I’m going to pop! This is too much, I will die!” But the great love that lives among the stars, calmly loving, even in the most desperate corners, won’t stop loving. Because it knows so, so, so much better. It says, “Patience dear one, I will breathe and you will learn.”

And now, Love blows new breaths into this life, and my eyes open wide and my ribs and skin tremble. I think to myself, “This is too much! This train is going too fast!” But immediately again I remember who is blowing and I close my eyes and say, “Yes. Blow into me all that is and all that you will give. The speed of this train is the speed of infinite calm.” I look at the relationship, with its great sweetness and its unfitting puzzle pieces. I think, frankly, “I don’t know how it will work!” But I feel the breaths coming into me warm and expansive and my shack becomes a house, and my house becomes a mansion. The mansion becomes a great breezy music hall with notes and melodies and a hooting pipe organ. The hall becomes a cavernous airplane hangar, huge with capacity for more and more Love. It is hung with sparkling lights and lanterns. Great winged beasts of Soul carouse its upper levels, landing on the arches, the spanning iron girders.

I watch and try to let Love’s great big breaths come in without fighting. Love is rubbing away the sharp corners, revealing sterling treasures in me and in her. Sometimes it looks a mess, but Love is washing us up like a mother with her babies.

The space for Love is immense and beautiful. Yet I know that the breaths with come again and again, changing it forever and for broader. Soon the iron will be gone and the walls will be gone and the wind will blow right through me, with no walls of any kind. Love will blow these strong and lifting breaths into my balloon so deeply and so patiently that I will expand and lift and grow until I – I will never pop in the hands of Love. The balloon disappears and the wind blows strong and Soulful, uniting us with no threat of parting. There are no buildings, no rooms, no walls – just the great beasts of Soul carousing in the upper parts of the sky, playing.