Make LOVE the word of the year for 2019

(and make it an action word)

2018 was pretty rough right?

I’m not down for resolutions… and even though a Burning Bowl ceremony sounds pretty cool, that’s not my bag either.

For 2019, I feel like there’s only one answer and it’s this: commit to every day, wild, active, radical LOVE.

What is Radical Love?

Radical love isn’t easy. In fact, radical love is the choice to love harder and in places where you dared not go before.

Hey, I know I can always start by loving the people who look, act, think and feel like me, but the secret is: I already love them. Even if I don’t know them or we haven’t even met.

Radical love calls me to use love to tear down differences. It’s calling me to question my impulses that often cause me to turn away or close my heart.

That will probably look or feel a lot like doing things that feel awkward at first — especially things like not always responded in my typical ways.

What is wild love?

If I’ve agreed to be radical in love — to find my discomfort and love into that — then I also want to be ready to be wild again.

I remember wild love, unreasonable and at the ready.

Wild love lives in desires… has no need to mire in self-reflection. In fact, it pulses right out from the root chakra, and as a side effect of its hot and grounding work, it feeds the throat chakra’s needs.

Filling up from the bottom of the self– that takes a long time. Especially when you’re a parent. It takes time to find your way back on a path that not only remembers the self, but responds to its wildest impulses without second guessing.

So maybe wild love looks like making space and not putting up walls and singing out loud again.

What is active love?

So, about making LOVE the word of 2019– I don’t want it to be theoretical. I don’t want it to live in this blog post and then wither.

Love is an enormous inner experience that is simultaneously shared and personal. It’s nebulous and changing, grows brighter and larger, then dims and gets lost.

But how does this happen? Is it magic ?

I believe I activate love through choice. By directing my thoughts toward an action, and then taking action. I can choose my relationships, and I can choose how I see the people in my life — for good or bad.

And then I can write, call, text, make plans… with love and service in mind.

The hard part of course is the every day part.

Because every day, I’m tired. I’m selfish. I have commitments that seem important. I have glowing screens that seem to need my attention even more than people.

Can I do it? Can I make LOVE the word of 2019 — not just in service of others, but to serve my own wild self?

I hope so. Because as I get older now, I am starting to understand/know/believe that love — as it continues to replicate and reinvent itself — is the only answer.