Love is fire for the alchemist. A fire that cannot be started at whim, but appears and burns when life says it’s time. By following inner impulses and allowing the stranger in, a fire had unwittingly been lit inside of me. At that moment, a part of me that was locked away long ago had been set free and given another chance to live.
Leo. Let me name thee. Let your name flicker on my breath and beat through these fingertips. Leo is he. The stranger who set me free.
After he left, Leo’s words echoed in my heart like a lion’s roar. A call to action. My heart responded to the call and burst into flame. With each inner adjustment, I began to understand my heart. To interpret its forgotten language. Via an inner whisper that has grown louder with time, my heart would guide me through an emotional terrain that had once left me spiritually crippled and lost. It felt, so I intuited, that we were being invoked. To fix what had been broken so many years before. But for what purpose? Leo? To earn the love of another? Every man I had ever asked God for was never given me. Every soul I wished to be mine never stayed. To ask was to guarantee he would not be mine. Yet, to not ask was equivalent to asking. For it was he who called me. It was he who told me how to be free.
“It’s easy to see that someone’s hurt you,” Leo said. “I’ve been hurt too. I’ve experienced so much loss. You have to let it go if you want to be free. Write a letter to the person who hurt you. Tell them what they did and how you have come to forgive. Then burn it. Don’t mail it because it will only put the negative energy back into the world. Burn it so it can be free.”
Free. I left home and my church at 18 in order to be free. Now at 38, I still had not tasted freedom. My need for love and acceptance was always too great. It didn’t allow me to just be. To go with the flow of life. My personality was too stiff and rigid. Always afraid that letting go might draw the wrong kind of attention. Might reveal too many imperfections. And God forbid you show me yours. I had way too many to take on anyone else’s. What I needed was a savior. A beacon to show me the way. That light never came.
With every failed relationship, I became increasingly afraid to take another chance at love. The risk might shatter the illusion of self I had pieced together from the ashes. But who said I had ever taken a risk in the first place? Every version of me I showed the world was not me. It was smoke and mirrors. Illusion. The me I thought you wanted. The me I thought could be loved. The me I thought I needed to be.
Who hurt me?
The light only allows us to see what we must at the moment. It takes faith to walk into the fire and that too will be tested. No one crosses to the other side without being transformed in some way.
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