TODAY I AM ENOUGH

Apprenticeship to Love: Meditations on this crooked path
March 4, 2026

TODAY'S MEDITATION

She is an always-changing current of energy. She frightens me. I want consistency. Steadiness. To be comforted.
We are not so different, she and me.

...

I have carefully cultivated this moment of comfort in my life. I want it to continue, unchanged. But this is a childish conceit.

It is also a conceit I have as a man, shared with my brother men. We are champions of decisive and visionary leadership and action. We are, by culture and nature, drawn to lighting the darkness, conquering the unknown, making it all secure, binding it with our sure knowledge.

But the world tests this conceit, with every breath and day of this life. The world and this life (and if we're blessed, the marriage we create) are the definition of instablity. They are what we mean when we say change.

Life changes. It tests me. Tested, I know myself more than my comforts, more than my fears. Testing me, life and love (and especially marriage) change me.

...

Today and most days, I am the son of my mother and my father. I am a man afraid in the face of change and darkness.

My father died several years ago. How many things changed with his dying? Many things. Most of them small, subtle. All of them shaking me.

Not so long ago, my mother went into the hospital with unbearable pain. My fears:

• that she would never leave the hospital;
• that she would never know her life again without pain.
  These fears, all of them shaking me.

Make death your ally, one teacher tells me. Allow it to sharpen your practice. Use it to bring focus to your life, how you're living. But death, whether the end of life or the end of comforts, they shake me.
...
My family was upset by my mother's crisis. In the face of their anxiety I didn't share my fears. I knew enough to simply hold them. Somehow, in my own shaking, I found a ground to stand on, so that I could feel their greater need of me to hold them and allow them to be flooded with, and not swept away. Holding them, I held myself. A curious thing, to feel afraid, and to find the courage and compasion to know my heart big enough for this.

...

Yesterday my beloved thanked me for holding her through her struggles.

To feel her trust and her gratitude... To hear her emerging, like one of the forest flowers I'm beginning to see in this late winter season, from the muck and mud of her sorrow...

Her changes are not only frightening, they are beautiful.

...

I practice to open my heart. To feel both the fear, and the joy of this moment, these days, this life.

No demand. No judgement. No wanting. Practicing to be open and vulnerable to it all.

Today I am the son. Today I am the brother and father and grandfather. Today I am the lover. I hold myself holy, that I may serve my beloved, my family. We are all changing, dying to become something I can't imagine. All of these changes I am learning to hold, without resistance.

There is, paradoxically, no time to waste resisting, and yet all the time necessary to allow myself to listen, to feel, to hold.
...
I used to be afraid, and I would close. "You're not like that anymore," she said. I am enough for all of this.

TODAY'S INSPIRATIONS

🌀The first chakra governs our physical survival; the second chakra our external approval; the third chakra tends to our internal approval...our nourishing of self through digestion. It's time to better understand the universal balance existing throughout this body region by deeply studying and appreciating its support of life.
Our prayer is that you practice this science of appreciation, within the art of compassion, every day, as you start your day. Approve of yourself, and you will begin to experience approval from life. Go(Guru Singh and Guruperkarma Kaur)

🌀The Conscious Warrior makes death an ally, using it to sharpen his present actions, future plans, and current state of being. (John Wineland , Precept 11)

🌀You're not like that now. (My Oracle)