August 2020 Love Letters

Agape and Agape

August 2020 Love Letters: Day 4

Hello, sweetheart!

How are you today? Are your feet tired? You’ve been running through my mind all day. ;-D I couldn’t wait to get off work so I could write to you. These love letters have become one of my new favorite parts of the day. Hopefully, you look forward to this as much as I do. We haven’t been able to hold or see each other in quite a while, so we must stay connected using our words.

I have always loved the written word, as I told you when I mentioned my favorite childhood book the other day. “A Wrinkle in Time” inspired me so much as a child I dedicated all of the space on my right arm to a tattooed interpretation of the book. If you’re lucky, you’ve seen it up close. My sleeve, to me, represents how we can save the world: LOVE.

Love is a word that means something different to each of us, and can even mean something different from one relationship to the next. In ancient times, the Greeks came up with seven different types of love: agape, eros, philia, ludus, pragma, philautia, and storge. You can read more about the different kinds here, but I would like to focus on agape. It is such a fun word. Depending on the definition you are using, it is either pronounced a-gape, or a-ga-pe. Pronounced a-gape, the word is an adjective that refers to your mouth and means wide open, especially with surprise or wonder. A-ga-pe is a noun, and refers to Christian or brotherly or universal love, (whichever term you prefer). I love that if you combine the definitions, it turns it into wondrous, wide open, universal love. It does not require knowing the object of your affection in order to be relevant. It is the type of love I am sending to you right now, and it is the purest magic I have ever known.

Come now, my darlings, y’all have known that I believe in magic for a long time. Y’all have seen me work my light as magic. I try to stay in reverent and childlike wonder, to believe in the good within us all, to hold fast to the mindset that if you confront someone with the right thing to do, they will do it 99.9% of the time. I expect you to be good, because I so strongly believe in the good within you. Silver linings, pure gold, wholly holy…I see you as you ARE. Not what the world may tell you about yourself, but as our divine Creator sees you. You are loved in wonder, through all of your wandering. This love is wide-open for YOU, and has no boundaries, no cut-off points…it is LIMITLESS.

You are a stunning, wonderful, mystical creation. You may see creation differently than I do, and that’s okay. It still took a man and a woman to come together as one to make the you that is reading this right now. We are equal parts of the two creations who created us. EQUAL. We go through many trials in this life, we have each felt the light and the darkness, and we can see the light even in the darkness; one cannot exist without the other. My darling, you know philosophy is my favorite thing to discuss with you, and over the course of these love letters, I will share my thoughts on creation. I allow myself to BE myself here with you, just as you are welcome exactly the way you are.

My favorite analogy of how I view what Christians refer to as the body of Christ gets a little mermaidy: God is love is the ocean. We are formed in a body of water. The ocean is like that body of water, and you are like a raindrop going through the weather cycle. You begin in the ocean, go on a raindrop journey, and then return to the ocean. While you are a raindrop, you have an individual identity. My particular raindrop at this moment is defined as fierce lively joy. Those are words I’ve chosen to identify with – labels. We like to label our selves, and as we do so, we create our identity here in this moment. Yet I am still made of ocean. While you can separate MY self as a raindrop, from YOUR self as a raindrop, we are BOTH still ocean. When we finish up our cycle as a raindrop, we return to where we came from, and we are no longer separate or able to be individually identified as raindrops, though we have carried back everything we experienced. The ocean does not reject a single raindrop.

Think about the golden rule: treat others the way you’d like to be treated. From my perspective, I see you as my self. The separation is only imagined and created by the labels we use to separate each other: by religion, or skin color, or nationality, sexual orientation…the list can go on forever. My darling, everything you do affects everyone around you. What you do to hurt or help others, hurts or helps yourself. What others do to hurt or help you, hurts or helps yourself. You are me, I am you, and we are not whole without each other. You, my love…you complete me. I am wondrously and wide openly in universal love with us. If eternity truly exists, then this moment is eternal. If you believe, in this moment, that you are separate, well…you are. If you believe in this moment, that you are one with all that is: you ARE. God says, “I AM.” As for me, I am agape with my agape for you. I know you love me equally. I will give you nothing less, and I will accept nothing less. Thank you, my darling, for loving me the way I love you. Thank you for sending me a mama/daddy hug. Thank you.

I am leaving you today with a gift, if you choose to accept it: Ho’oponopono.

I’m sorry. Please forgive me. I love you. Thank you.

I am forever yours,

L Joy

Lauren