“If you can love the wrong person that much, stop and think how much more you can love the right person.”

That was an email from my father today. That was all he said. It was his response to my latest poem entitled Sotto Voce. It had to be the most profound piece of wisdom he has ever said to me and a wake-up call that has stopped me dead in my tracks. It brings to mind how much energy we spend on people who seem to zap that energy we so desperately need to live and survive on a daily basis. My poem does reflect a personal experience and it pains me to read it again and again. It’s a feeling of dread; like I have been diagnosed with a disease that will not kill me, but linger on throughout my whole life, tormenting me. I had hoped that getting it out might eradicate it from my mind and help me to figure some things out. But instead it seems to play a permanent cryptic aspect in my life.

I’ve noticed among my friends and just listening to the lives of others how unhappy so many people are in their current status of love and loathing. How their circumstances have trapped them into a life they no longer want to lead or shouldn’t have started in the first place. We are creatures of habit and sometimes staying in situations that are painful is somehow less damaging than getting out and dealing with the inevitable. However, the opposite is true. Our choices have an often times unknown radius that affects the most innocent. I’ve been a victim of this: so many of my friends have been victims of this and most still remain in this tangled state. It’s a tragic life to lead when you want to be somewhere else and you actually begin to treat yourself as a prisoner of your choices; sometimes choices that you make in all the right frames of mine. The cosmos doesn’t appear to make sense. Yet, it all makes perfect, beautiful, glorious sense! The flow of love, friendship, desire and death; it’s all meant to be just as it is, right or wrong.

I’ve been recently aware of certain people that have come into my life for reasons that I will not understand until their gone. It’s also come to light that if there really is one person for everyone, or that “soul mate” that everyone talks about, it’s actually not the person you are really supposed to be with for the rest of your life because your soul mate makes you a better person through harsh realities, through forbidden pleasures. How could one stand to spend the rest of their lives with someone who constantly makes them feel like that? I have met my soul mate, I believe from a previous life, but nonetheless, he is and I would have to agree with the above that it would be too painful to be with him and so the time I had was just right. What took place with that individual was perfect and full of vast knowledge that I will probably never experience again.

I want to spend my energy in the positive; an over-abundance of living. I will no longer expend my energy looking for “the one” but more for the brief experiences that enrich my life, be it painful, joyful or both. Recognizing the immense amount of energy I have to give to another is mind-altering and staggers me like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I am my own Ashram, my own Healer, my own Love and my own Forgiver.