“The moment you have in your heart this extraordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.”

– Jiddu Krishnamurti

I am feeling a little out of breath as I sit down to write today.  My morning walk still lies ahead, so it is not from that exertion.  A little while ago I was in my kitchen, performing my  morning routine of packing lunches and preparing for the day, when a bit of color in the sky caught my eye.  What I saw when i looked outside was a marvelous cloud formation moving across the rising sun and creating a breathtaking start to the day.  I hurried through my morning tasks and ran across the backyard with camera in hand to capture the loveliness of the dawning of a brand new day.  It has been nearly six years since I made a decisive choice to be happy — to be love for the world wherever I walked — and after all that time, I am still a sucker for a sunrise.

For so many years, I stumbled through life feeling as though I had nothing to give, no power to change all the sadness and darkness that seemed to cover the earth.  I can’t put my finger on the moment when it all changed; but I can say that simply by acknowledging the love and light that had been in my heart all the time, and by allowing it to shine as I made my way through life, I opened my eyes each morning to a world that was transformed from a place of darkness to one of beauty and light.

I wish I could tell you that this change was easy.  I wish I could tell you that it happened in an instant.  The truth is that un-burying the love after years of collecting the debris that kept it hidden was a slow and sometimes painful process.  I had covered the love and light in my heart with many accumulated beliefs about my inadequacy and ineffectiveness.  In order to liberate the love, I needed to clean house.  I’m not sure why, but I discovered that it was not an easy thing to let go of the familiar assumptions that dragged me down and to trust that what remained would be something better.  I think at this moment of the TV programs about extreme hoarders.  Just like the people they feature, we are buried in piles of things we have collected, with all good intentions, until one day we awake to the realization that we no longer can find ourselves under the debris.  We are creatures of habit; and it is not easy to change the things that keep us from being who we truly can be.  Cleaning house and changing our old ways requires more than a small effort — it requires true transformation.

Another thing I began doing during my own time of transformation was taking pictures of all the beauty in the natural world.  What I saw again and again was that in order for beauty to be born, something that already existed had to die.  Over time, and through many repetitions, I saw that the love in the universe was reliable and that leaving something behind was more than just a loss — it was an opportunity to let something new in that brought a different sort of beauty to replace what was lost.  What we forget is the part where we set something down, with love, and free our arms to embrace the newness that comes our way.

Some of my favorite photographic subjects are butterflies.  Maybe I love them so much because I spent so many years as a caterpillar.  I was a great caterpillar.  I embraced my crawl through the world and loved the way my hundred feet moved in coordination to get me where I needed to go.  I was an efficient caterpillar and led a perfectly stellar caterpillar life; but caterpillars are not meant to remain caterpillars — they are destined to become butterflies.  It was a sad and solemn day when I left my hundred legs behind and crawled into my contemplative cocoon, not knowing who I would be when I emerged — if I emerged at all.  It was there, deep inside my own cocoon with only my own heart beating, that I rediscovered the love.  Now, when I awake each morning, I shake the dust of night off of my colorful wings and let them shine with all the light of all the love in my fluttering heart.  With great excitement, I accept the gift of another day waiting for love, and take flight.  I am still a sucker for a sunrise.