To The Other Side of Dreaming

strength to love, courage to hope

dear stacey,

I must be feeling better, this is the first urge to write I have had in days.  I have been thinking more and more about Martin Luther King Jr.’s book, Strength to Love;  about the courage and the strength it takes to love.  I remember reading it for the first time, feeling it change me, and staring at the words, running them over and over in my mind and saying them slowly out loud, “the strength to love.”  Feeling like it was something that could save me, ignite me and break me at the same time.  

the strength to love, the strength to love, the strength to love.  

I think about it all the time, but lately it has been on my mind because I have been wondering about the strength to hope and believe.  Sometimes I find that it is harder to find the courage to hope and believe in love than it is to love…and perhaps they are all one in the same.

At the beginning of this year, I decided that I knew how to protect my heart and now I wanted to learn how to take care of it.  I wanted to learn how to listen to it more, how to follow it, how to open it, how to let it breathe.  The strength to love.  It seems like I’ve lived a lifetime of keeping it shut tight, being a good patient on the examining table who could sit still quietly and be “so brave;” a good adoptee, steeling myself to the outside.  Building accessible home with you is a part of taking care of my heart.  Finding the strength to believe that something else is possible is part of that too.  Letting myself hope for it, as terrifying as it is sometimes, also feels like a part of that.  Our hearts ache to hope, at the very same time they ache from disappointment and pain, don’t they?

There have been two places we have found along this journey that have felt like they could possibly work, but have both fallen through.  And the first and second time we leapt with hope and fell hard.  And now we say things to each other like, “don’t get excited” or “i’m afraid to hope.”  But how can that lead us to love?  How can that lead us to our hearts; to home?  Where is the line between protecting and caring?  Where are the places inside of us that have learned to not feel because of violence, oppression, fear, hurt and disappointment from others and our selves?  What is the line between survival and the other side of dreaming?  What does it mean to think things could be any way than they have always been?  It could save me, ignite me and break me at the same time.  

And there are many days when I cannot believe because the cost of it would be my very existence and I know that is a different kind of love; no worse or better, but different and necessary.  I owe my life to survival and hope, and i am grateful for both of them.  They are part of what makes me whole and human.  Some days I can do both and some days I cannot. 

the strength to love.

everyday is a new chance for the strength to love, hope and believe.  To believe that things (we) can be different, can change; that transformation and healing are possible; that we are all moving closer to the world we desire and long for.  To find the strength to love ourselves enough to get through the night, the pain, the brokenness, and even if we don’t, to know that our resistance lives on.  There is no shame. 

so I will hope for the recent place we visited, fell in love with and submitted applications to.  I hope we get it.  I hope we get it.  I hope we get it.  It felt like it could be home.  And I believe in home, i do, wherever that may end-up being.

The moment we choose to love, we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love, we begin to move toward freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.  -bell hooks

love,

mia

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