I have commitments to
take good care of my pets; I have a commitment to my husband to be a beautiful
partner and to uphold the Absolute with him as we go through life together. I
do the best I can every day with these commitments. I feel so blessed that I
was able to care for my mother Mary in my home at the end of her life. I never felt that it was a burden because I
knew I was fulfilling a contract to help. She had asked me a long time ago not
to put her in a nursing home, and I told her, “I never will.” And believe me,
there were times when I wanted her to go into a home and times when all she
wanted to do was get out of here, somewhere else, anywhere else. But something
greater kept us always coming back around. I kept surrendering, she kept
surrendering, and my husband kept surrendering, into more and more beauty to
fulfill the commitment.
Something happens inside
of us when we fulfill a commitment; something gets stronger. Some hole gets
filled in with more light, and our awareness of what we are really doing here is deepened.
When you fulfill your
commitments, you give yourself the very thing you are looking for. But what you
are looking for is never found through the easy or familiar route. Always take
the harder way, “the road less traveled,” however life presents it. We give up
the golden key, and we do not even know that we are giving it up when we take
the comfortable route. It may be comfortable in the short run, but in the long
run, on the level of the Soul, we miss something.
For instance, what if
you have never, on some level, cared for someone who is dying? What if you have
never been close to that or helped someone go through that portal? Death is
something then that you haven’t worked with: What is death, what is life? Where
do I go, what is going on here? We all face that same portal. By being close to
birth, by being intimate in our relationships, and by being close to death, we
stay whole.
Can you endure the
cracking open of your heart when you let love in, so that you are completely
exposed and all that light and love is experienced? Can you handle that?
Because that is what people avoid even though that is what they are looking
for. It is a paradox. People avoid the intimacy, they avoid the commitment,
they avoid the hardship of relationship—any relationship—when relationship is
actually what holds the essence.