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THE WAYS OF LOVE
How do I love? Let me count the ways…

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A Message from Marj, incl. invitation for our Worldwide Call
this Wednesday August 7th at 10 am PDT (Recording included below)

Look at our email cover photo, the lighted candles, with the colors of the chakras, held by hands that seem to exist in the darkness.  With the events in America within this past week in Texas and Ohio, I am feeling some of that darkness.  Are you?  I invite you to become aware of all of the vibrations of Light existing within your very being, from the root chakra to the crown, and your power of choice, either constricting or opening to the Living Flame of Love.

I have always loved Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s beautiful poem that was written between 1845 and 1846 while she was being courted by Robert Browning.  It was first published in 1850.  It still plays sometimes in my heart and mind.  I’ve read it hundreds of times.  “How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways…”   Then she uses words and phrases to describe the ‘how’.
To the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach; to the ends of Being and ideal Grace; to the level of every day’s most quiet need; freely as we strive for Right; purely, as we turn from Praise; with passion put to use in old griefs; with childhood faith; with a love I seemed to lose; with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life; and if God choose, I will love thee better after death.  Do you relate to any of these?  Have they shown up in your life, now or in the past?

Can we go from relating love to one special person to relating Love to the All That Is? Can we relate it to the Essence of those ones who have been special and extraordinary in our lives AND also to ones who are strangers and ordinary to us?  Can we shift from human love to Love that is about Spirit descending and the Soul ascending?

So many of my ‘anchors’ in Love have come in as Awareness of awareness.  “Let me count the ways” took me to “I Am the Way”, the words of Jesus.  That took me to The Greatest Commandment:  You shall love…your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.   And, you shall love the other as yourself.  For me, ‘God’ includes the literal, the subtle and the causal, it includes whatever definition of God works for anyone, wherever someone is in their journey of darkness or of Light.

I thought about John of the Cross whose most famous book was about the Dark Night of the Soul.  Few people even know that his last book was about the Living Flame of Love, few people have read it.  When I did a talk on it once, some people told me they didn’t understand it.  Do we understand the phrase that I use in my book, ‘Dancing all of the colors of the rainbow’?  All of the colors are needed in the spectrum of Light.

Are we willing to count the ways we have known love, received its Light in various degrees of awareness, and given its Light in the various ways that our own Gifts of Genius may have called us to bring it into the marketplace, ultimately with Gift-Bestowing Hands that selflessly serve?

Other anchors came to remind me:  Llewellyn Vaughan Lee’s ‘Love Is a Fire and I Am Wood’, his beautiful teaching on the Sufi’s mystical journey home and how the deepest fire of the heart’s passion and the fire of the Divine are one and the same.  It is a mystical path of love that reaches out to the other and even pulls you deeper into the heart of the Beloved.

In our time together on our monthly call this week, my invitation is that we find ourselves, wherever we are, perhaps Warriors of Love, perhaps in ordinary settings, perhaps in Knowing and Realizing our Oneness.  I am so looking forward to our call on Wednesday at 10 am PDT:

Called by Love Institute Worldwide Call
Wednesday, August 7th at 10 am PDT, RECORDING: 
https://instantteleseminar.com/Events/116470146

With Deep Love and Gratitude,

Marj

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