Module 40: Connecting My Dots

Love is … a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them – we can only love others as much as we love ourselves.

~ Brené Brown

“We are all wonderful, beautiful wrecks. That's what connects us--that we're all broken, all beautifully imperfect.” 
~ Emilio Estevez

Connection is one of those seemingly simple words with a truckload of meanings. And if our meanings don’t intersect, there’s only disconnection.

I chose these quotes BEcause they equalise one another. I mean, there is a balance in each and a swooping sort of gentle keeping together, in my mind alone perhaps, that they each make sense of for me.

These past six years there has been much composting in me, and only the very slightest of cultivating. In particular where connection is concerned. That is the way of connection for me, I think. Neither good nor bad, right nor wrong. Just what is, what I see when I don’t avert my eyes or my heart.

I hear sometimes some concern that I am “too much alone,” even a bit too enamoured of my solitude. It is how it looks from There I suppose. From Here there is an entirely other sort of perspective.

Over and over and sadly over yet again I have had a loving and wondrous partnership come apart. A bit like Ikea furniture, they may have been too haphazardly put together. I may have simply decided I needed to HAVE a relationship and forgotten the essential connection piece.

After awhile a relationship without true connection grows unsteady and falls apart. As Brené Brown wrote, connection can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them. Does this surprise me to see from Here?! Nope.

Of course, the reason for my over and over and sadly over yet again track record in partnership is 99% about what didn’t exist, that DOES exist Now. Only in me. I can’t speak for anyone else.

I never KNEW what loving ME was. How it looked or spoke or dreamt or sounded. What made it and what hobbled it. The past six years have cleared that up. Yes indeedie!!!

Thus Emilio Estevez’s We are all wonderful, beautiful wrecks… What I never saw, until just recently, is that I am a “wonderful, beautiful wreck” and NOT just a big fat mistake with torn paper all round it from vigourous erasing!!

A gorgeous patchwork of optimistic starts and reasonable unfinishednesses.

Brokenness doesn’t fix brokenness, no matter how hard I insisted otherwise. Love finds love where it does, and generally it gravitates to similarities. NOT pointing fingers, mind you, I’m just saying it’s NOT that much of a news flash that my connections have tended to fall apart.

Loving myself requires knowing myself. It’s no wonder I’ve spent so much time alone these past years.

I am too easily distracted, I’ve discovered, and I need TIME to get quiet enough to really hear myself.