Long ❤️ ❤️ Loves

Long Love.

Love that sits low and deep in your being and shows itself to you through a song, a fragrance, a taste. It’s really anytime when love sparks a memory. I’m considering the deep guttural love today. I acknowledge the whimsy love but today I’m reflecting on the love that is incorporated into your being on a cellular level. You all know this love but may not have rested long enough to consider it.

This love can be familial but doesn’t have to be. For instance, I have a long love, deep and gracious love of a brother of mine. Mostly because we’ve shared experiences that built these understandings of eternal connection and trust. I talk to him rarely. We aren’t besties. To look at us you wouldn’t say we are close. But we have history. We have shared experiences that give him a life long and protected place in my heart. A place that would bring out my champion for him if he needed me. Now this same brother has built a life, married, has a couple of kids and a huge social web of love and admiration. There is distance between us yet I consider him in my “long love” list.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my other siblings, I do. But I don’t truly know them. I haven’t the love connection. I have the gene pool love that makes them important but not a “long love”button pusher.

As I review my “Long Loves” I see a life saving quality in these folks. As if they popped into my existence when I needed a life ring tossed from the boat named “life in turbulence “ or they brought so much enrichment to my heart that the love remembers and my heart blooms when in the presence of “long loves”.

My heart remembers, engages, celebrates and applauds these people who make my heart beam.

This month I took a saunter into Long and Young loves. I spoke to one of my long loves about this pondering. This man and I have been friends for over 30 years. We’ve weaved in and out of our existence over the years because of long love.

He shares his family with me. We are comfortable in silence and love a great story or board game. I told him I admire him.
I admire those gryphons who raise out of the ashes and become people who you can consider a “long love”. His life partner is a long love too. Maybe because we share the love for all their kids, maybe because she loves him and that is a gift to me, or maybe because we are so similar that I project a “Little love of self “ on to her.

I know you’ve been surprised when you find yourself reacting to seeing a long lost friend in an over the top manner. It’s as if the heart remembers the love for them before your mind can catch up.

This is the “long love” theory.

I reunited with a family who employed me nearly 40 years ago this week. There was trepidation, anxiety and excitement all meshed together in the anticipation of the e visit. Yet when we met, after all those years, the heart remembered and only “long love” was between us.

Long love makes it easy to be together. Long love is judgment free. Long love oozes acceptance and forgiveness it forgets life’s emotional road bumps. Long love hugs for real not because it’s expected.

I heard myself counting my blessings for these long loves that exist for me. I have had many folks say they’d be hard pressed to discover these “long love connections” but I challenge that. I believe these connections surprise you. They are lying dormant ready to be sparked back into existence.

here’s to “long loves”… may we have them, may we recognize them, may they surprise us at every turn. Raise your hearts to remembering your champions, your tender friends, your supportive folks who visited your life’s path. May they make your heart race, beam and explode with love the next time you run into them.



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