Patience is a mark of truest love. Patience deepens love over time.
When we open to patience like a flower, we enter the soul of matter. We marry the little strings, and together they tie and they bond, and show us how everything is connected and imbued with spirit. Soul-sized is the land of our heart, and that’s the land that matters. And if we can truly trust it, trust the voice of our heart, trust our soul, then we will inevitably be guided along the invisible maps and geographies towards our destiny; with a kindness of rhythm in our small, perhaps sometimes even seemingly insignificant steps, that might just be our greatest blessings across the twists and curves of our life’s paths. As we allow life to move through us, and mold us into what we were always meant to be, along our unique emotional wildlands, is what will one day shape and become the stories we were meant to tell.
But let’s dive further.
I recently read some beautiful words by Thomas Merton from his book New Seeds of Contemplation: “Hurry ruins saints as well as artists.” He writes that many poets are not poets for the same reasons that many religious men are not saints – because they never succeed in being themselves and allowing themselves to be experienced in their own individual lives. We can’t hurry the process, and we can’t write the stories we were meant to write before we experience them. We have to be willing to trust the unfolding of our own unique lives. And only when we listen from within, and follow the rhythms of our inner land, we can recognize the destined beauty unfolding through the vessel of our body. It is divinely guided yet always unfolds through time. It is a work of love, with great patience, faith and humility.
The essence of patience is resilience. Patience is a devotion to resilience, and a courage to stay gentle. Patience isn’t inaction, rather it is a timing and recognition of the right time. Good rain is one that falls in the right time, nourishing and breathing life into the soil. Sometimes things can be overwatered, hurried, and no rose will grow in her sweetest scent.
The same goes with writing. Once we write a book, we almost feel like we have to begin the next book. And sometimes words don’t come. I see this as a good sign – it means that we have written something so fully and completely that we’ve expressed it all. So now we need patience for the next story to shape. And it will. In its own time.
It was two years ago when I designed my website and started Art of Love, and now looking back my heart is full of all the stories that shaped along the way; stories that I never even knew I’d write, stories that were more beautiful than I could have dreamt of. To think of how long I wanted to have a space of my own, where I could express my creativity and write in my freedom, and yet how long it took to get to here – to finally one day sit down and Google “How do I build a website?”. And/But the words “long” and “finally” don’t carry much meaning, because it was exactly the right timing when I did it. We underestimate the power of presence and allowing, and we certainly often forget that time is a matter of timing – unclockable, away from schedules and shoulds and human hands. Our soul always knows the right way, the right time, and will give us messages through our feelings; all we have to do is listen and understand its unique language, and trust it when it guides us along the invisible geographies.
In a way, patience is also about deep respect and appreciation – it is about reverence. John O’Donohue writes beautifully on this topic and about the rituals of approach:
“What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practiced careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation. When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.”
“Often we approach things with greed and urgency, we do not like to wait. As we wait at the vertical altar to go on-line, we become frustrated by the few extra seconds the machine needs to find its mind. Computer makers are constantly at work to cut the transition time; the flick from world to cyber-world must become seamless. We live under the imperative of the stand-alone digital instant; and it is uncanny how neatly that instant has become the measure not alone of time but of space. Classically, the understanding of life, the unfolding of identity and creativity, the notion of growth and discovery were articulated through the metaphor of the journey. Each friendship and love is the intimate journey where the soul is born and grows. The journey is the drama of the heart’s voyage into the tide of possibilities which open before it. Indeed, a book is a path of words which takes the heart in a new direction.”
How true indeed: when we approach life with deep appreciation and patience, beauty and love approach us. This is more than a mindset – reverence shapeshifts into an almost physical state – it becomes an attention of the body, when we are fully embodied and present, all of our senses opened and deeply connected, and we are shown that the sacredness is already here. Reverence, like patience, are the soul companions of humility. Because we recognize that we are always in the presence of the sacred – that the divine flows through our body and that it is in everything. This understanding gives us a certain kind of peace because we let go of judgments about how we should hurry things, about how *it* should be be and look like, and we stop comparing ourselves to others and even to our own previous selves; with this freedom and allowance, we begin to open doors and thresholds everywhere. Some will be spaces where we’ll have some quietness and stillness, where in our surrender and seemingly not-doing, we’ll be shaping worlds within us; other spaces will be exploring unknown worlds and distant lands perhaps, and being approached by new stories and feelings; and others will be rooms with a writing desk. So much beauty awaits, within and without.
And since this is the Art of Love, let’s talk about love a little more. Like devotion and trust, patience is one of the foundations of beautiful relationships and building deep intimacy.
Patience is a mark of truest love. Patience is what deepens love over time. Patience is an act of deep respect towards another person.
Each relationship is an intimate pathway of twists and curves across its unique physical and emotional wildlands, where a soul is born and grows. With a kindness of rhythm, we can allow its blessing to approach us, its beauty to move through our body, and mold us into what was meant to become all along.
We all have our own languages, expressions and unique worlds within us. I’ve heard some women say that men don’t want to know us or understand us – but that’s not true. The ones who truly love you will want to know you, will want to know every piece of you, of your skin and all the pieces within you, but you have to share your deep knowing. So when a man asks you, and is willing to learn and know and understand you, and your language and your world – tell him. Tell him not just because, tell him because his soul has asked you to.
Open to patience like a flower, and enter the soul of matter. Because soul-sized is the land of our heart, and that’s the land that truly matters.
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Cover art: Water-lily Pond by Claude Monet, 1917-1919, via Wikimedia Commons.