Mike said something last week that keeps echoing in my mind: "Learning love and freedom is something we have to practice every day."

Someone else said this week, "Happiness is as much about letting go as taking in."

Holding on isn't the best way to happiness.  If it were, we'd be happy hoarders.  If it were, we'd be saying, with great joy, "I just gained 30 pounds!" Letting go of things, giving them to someone whose time it is to have them, releasing ideas and expectations, even some of our cherished opinions from time to time--these seem to bring more happiness than holding on.

When a stranger reached into my wallet and took $450 last week, I felt shocked, but why should I be?  Robberies happen every day; I've just been lucky enough so far not to have to know this side of someone else's desperation and need.  

After hours of trying to figure out how it may have happened, who it could have been, lying awake almost all night, I woke up with a sense of peace about it.

I'm like a dog with a bone with any story.  I want to know all the particulars. I want to understand how the parts fit together.  I'm consumed with a desire to know the truth, even if it's not the one I wanted.

I do know this: love and freedom ask us all to give up on perfection and to let go of our ideas of how another person (and ourselves) should be. Sometimes the practice of love and freedom requires intentional demolition of certain beliefs about "should."

If you love the butterfly, you have to let it go.  If it comes back to you, it was yours all the time. 

When Giving Is All We Have 

Alberto Ríos, 1952

                                              One river gives
                                              Its journey to the next.

We give because someone gave to us.
We give because nobody gave to us.

We give because giving has changed us.
We give because giving could have changed us.

We have been better for it,
We have been wounded by it—

Giving has many faces: It is loud and quiet,
Big, though small, diamond in wood-nails.

Its story is old, the plot worn and the pages too,
But we read this book, anyway, over and again:

Giving is, first and every time, hand to hand,
Mine to yours, yours to mine.

You gave me blue and I gave you yellow.
Together we are simple green. You gave me

What you did not have, and I gave you
What I had to give—together, we made

Something greater from the difference.