Tag: love

Choosing “Different”

Photograph © 2017 Peggy Kornegger
Life at its most fulfilling and expansive is not about fitting in or aspiring to socially promoted goals like a 24/7 career, with accompanying big money, house, car, and investments. It’s also not about finding one “perfect” soul mate and living happily ever after. That’s the Cinderella story they keep trying to get women to buy into so that we forget that who we really are is Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman who has her own unique, independent soul and doesn’t need anyone to make her life perfect. This applies to men looking for one mate to fulfill them too. We are not half-humans searching for the missing part to make us whole. Nor are we necessarily one gender, one expression, one role, or one anything. We are so much more.

We humans are souls not roles, beings not doings. What if life is really about your own soul and its particular destiny, intertwined with many others but not dependent upon them? So that every person you meet on your journey is a soul mate of some kind (someone with whom you share a deep connection). It’s not about “one”: it’s about oneness. Within that, you could have a partner for life, or several different partners over a lifetime, as well as many friends, all of them soul mates. Some people choose friendships rather than partnerships, or they opt for no labels at all. We meet the people we are meant to meet when we are meant to. Our relationships may be short or long, easy or challenging, but ultimately, it’s about our soul’s journey, not about a mythic “forever after” with one person. It’s about the eternal now, which is constantly evolving.

We are living in a new era of stepping out of the old stories and social paradigms that held us prisoner in expected behavior for so long. Now is the time to choose “different”: to leap like an empowered super hero over outdated frameworks, paradigms, and expectations. Choose something new—beyond your wildest dreams. Choose infinite possibility. Choose your soul self. And choose universal love that is inclusive of every being on this planet. How would the world shift if we saw everyone as a soul mate, a kindred spirit with whom we could share a sacred exchange, soul to soul? The love of all within the love of the one before you.

Whether for one moment or a lifetime, friend or lover, the connection is at the soul level. It is beyond gender and beyond roles. It is about the heart. The human heart and God’s heart (and they are one and the same). If we live from the heart, we are always choosing love—which in this world is choosing “different.” Give it a try. Love yourself, your soul self. And love your neighbor as your soul mate, your dearest friend. The world will open up all around you, and you will see kindred spirits (and God) wherever you look. And that is life’s greatest fulfillment.

 

A Love Story

Photograph © 2017 Peggy Kornegger
Mt. Auburn Cemetery, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has been my spiritual and nature sanctuary for more than twenty years. Filled with towering trees, flowering bushes, and wildflowers, as well as ponds, hills, and dells, it is the closest I come to being in the country while living not far from Boston’s urban landscape. I walk there in silent meditation at all times of the year, and every spring I spend countless hours observing the annual migration of songbirds from Central and South America. Hundreds of birds come through Mt. Auburn, and some nest there, because of its abundance of trees and other natural features.

The history of the cemetery itself as well as those buried there, known and unknown, is quite interesting too, but I usually pay only fleeting attention to the angel sculptures and carved gravestones, as my eyes are focused upward, looking through my binoculars at orioles, tanagers, and warblers. I always take note of Longfellow’s and Margaret Fuller’s graves as I pass, but other than that, the birds and nature are my primary reasons for being there. All that changed one Saturday last month, however, when, as I rounded a turn on a familiar hillside path, I suddenly noticed a gravestone I had not noticed previously.

My eyes were first drawn to a quote by the Dalai Lama etched in the stone: “Be kind whenever possible. (It is always possible.).” Wondering who had chosen it (one of my own favorites), I glanced at the names above it. Immediately, I saw that they were both women and were both born in 1949. One was still alive, and the other had died in 2013. Just below these dates was the single line: “Married on June 15, 2004.” The story this simple gravestone told may have been invisible to some, but to me, another lesbian, it was crystal clear. These two women had married immediately after same-sex marriage became legal in Massachusetts in May of 2004, and one had died nine years later. As the emotional impact of that hit me, I glanced down further at the bottom of the stone, where I read the following sentence: “Together we could do anything.”

This completely undid me, and I began to sob openly. Fortunately, no one was nearby. I just stood there and let my heart completely break open with love and sorrow for these women who had shared their lives, at long-last legally recognized, and then been separated by death. I could not help but feel close to them because my partner Anne and I had also married when same-sex marriage became legal (after 31 years together). Our ceremony was held on June 22, 2014 (three years ago today) at Mt. Auburn Cemetery’s Auburn Lake, not far from where I was standing at that moment. The parallels sent chills up and down my spine.

Part of Anne’s and my decision to marry was that we didn’t want to regret not having had a special ceremony to share our love with friends and family, even though our relationship was not a new one. I could only imagine how these two women felt—about how important their marriage and those nine years were to them. A delicate etching at the top of the stone shows a path leading to distant mountains and a table in the foreground with an open book on it, cat below. I imagined them hiking, reading, and loving their cat together, just as Anne and I have done. I also pictured the surviving partner choosing the images as a way of cherishing those memories.

Our lives are so intertwined, we human souls. We think we are living distinctly individual destinies, but at moments like this, we see the larger picture, filled with synchronistic commonality. Really, there is only one destiny, and that is love. When we meet—beautiful gender-free spirits in human form—and allow love to fill us, yes, we can do anything, together. We can touch hearts beyond our own lifetimes with the sheer power of the love we embody and share.

• Dedicated to Julie Felty and Susan Donaldson

Gifts from God

Photograph © 2017 Peggy Kornegger
The people in our lives are gifts from God, not there by happenstance but by design. And not to be taken for granted or overlooked but instead continuously recognized and treasured. In my day-to-day life, my spiritual path repeatedly draws me inward to a profound divine connection. Within that experience, I feel as one with everything in the cosmos. I love those experiences. They teach me again and again why I am here on this planet. Yet, what I forget sometimes is that I am also here to connect with my fellow human beings, to be a part of their lives and have them be a part of mine. Meditation and inner journeys are extraordinary, but this Earth experience when shared at the deepest level with others is equally extraordinary. Without it, your heart can never crack open wide enough to let the divine in—or out.

A few Saturdays ago, I spent the day with two friends, a married couple whom I’ve known for over thirty years. In the morning, my partner Anne and I helped her mulch their garden with several other neighbors and friends, and in the afternoon we visited her husband at a rehab center in Boston, where he was recovering from chemo treatments for cancer. We hadn’t seen him for several months, and our visit was a surprise. The expression of welcoming joy on his face when we walked in was enough to bring tears to all of our eyes. After we hugged and then chatted a bit, we went to nearby Waterfront Park for an impromptu picnic. As we watched the boats and people come and go and basked in the spring sunshine, we told stories and shared experiences, past and present, that brought us all even closer together. Moments of laughter and tears that mean so much when old friends reunite, especially in the midst of life challenges like they have been facing.

And it was precisely that old friendship and those challenges that allowed us to drop everything nonessential from our conversations (and for them, from their lives). At times like these, we remember what is really important: to look in another human being’s eyes and say “I love you.” And we did. Nothing else matters. Nothing. So many times, we get caught up in our own lives and forget that essential truth, that key to all human relationships and to all of life: Love. Openly expressed and shared. We are here for such a relatively short time on this planet. Why waste a single moment in distraction or separation of any kind? We all feel joy, we all feel pain, our hearts encompass every possible human emotion. We are alike, we human souls in physical form—let’s not lose sight of our essential oneness.

When Anne and I came home, we felt we had been blessed with such a sacred experience in that unplanned day with our friends. The laundry undone, the emails unanswered—what did it matter? To-do lists are meant to be tossed aside in favor of spontaneous life moments that God presents us with every day. The people in your life are gifts from God. Their lives are precious, as is yours—don’t chose routine, or even meditation, when a human/divine soul stands before you ready to share their heart with you. That is why you were born, why I was born. Let us remember together the love that links our lives.

Flower Child

Photograph © Peggy Kornegger

I went to San Francisco. And yes, I wore flowers in my hair. I was one of those young beaded, bell-bottomed kids who moved to California in the late 1960s, drawn by the irresistible call for “Love, Peace, and Flower Power.” 2017 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the famous San Francisco “Summer of Love.” Hard to believe that that much time has passed. In some ways, I still feel the same inside as I did when I left the Midwest for California, suitcase packed with utopian dreams. I still have those dreams. And I’m still a flower child at heart.

During 1967’s Summer of Love, it didn’t really matter where you were—that powerful energetic vibration affected you. In Michigan, I was preparing to leave for six months studying in France, but San Francisco was where I longed to be. All summer, I stayed up late into the night painting psychedelic posters and listening to Dylan, Donovan, and the Beatles. My longing continued right through the fall and spring at school in Europe (a French version of Scott McKenzie’s song about San Francisco seemed to be playing everywhere). Finally I reached the promised land in 1968. Was it all I hoped it would be? Yes, and more. It wasn’t exactly utopia, but it was a beginning. It brought me new adventures, new friends, and inner transformation, and that was just what I wanted.

Photograph © Peggy Kornegger

The key component was the Dream. All of us who headed west in those years were dreamers, free spirits awakening to a global movement for universal love, peace, freedom, and radical change that is still streaming live through this world today. California was/is a state of mind, the psychic birthplace of possibility, of expansion outward beyond limitation. I was one of so many who undertook that journey. Some lost their way, but others, like me, are still journeying, still choosing love over fear every day of our lives.

California has felt like “home” to me for most of my adult life. Even though I grew up in Illinois, it is on my return trips to California that I begin to cry when I look down from the plane and see the landscape and ocean beneath me. I loved my years there. It was a time of transition, from small-town girl to flower child/activist in the larger world. I was a beginner, innocent in many ways, learning about life, love, poetry, politics—and figuring out who I was within all those frameworks. Of course, like others of my generation, I never wanted to be just one thing, live just one place, so after a few years on the West Coast in the late 1960s and earlier 1970s, I moved to the East Coast for graduate school. San Francisco called me back once again for several years after that, but then I returned to Boston. Since then, I visit California; I don’t live there physically.

Still, my soul is somehow timelessly connected to California. Perhaps I lived there in a past life, in addition to those key years in the 60s and 70s. Now, when I return, I stand looking out at the Pacific Ocean, and my mind quiets, my spirit rests. My heart recognizes “home.” The home that transcends time and place and links up with something intangible in the universe, in myself. The home that I found among those sweet youthful souls with visions of a better world. I will always be one of them.

 

Where Exactly Is God?

This is a question that many of us may have asked at different times in our lives, either from curiosity or in frustration. In this week’s video blog, I talk about both of these ways of wondering about God’s existence—whatever word you wish to use for Source energy or universal consciousness—and my own thoughts on where it can be found.