I will always fall head over heels and hope for you to stay just a little while longer.

I’ve been watching several people who are close to me, to whom I’ve been inexplicably connected.

Certainties are falling away from them, they look around and the ground they’ve built a world upon seems to have slipped away. They reach out for a place to grasp, a crack in the rock’s face that bestows some sense of understanding, and it serves them, for a moment, for a brief rest. And then those certainties slip away.

As if the world tests their faith… I commented to one friend yesterday that the process of becoming seems to precipitate great and furious storms.

There’s such a beauty in the process, and yet such a lonely sorrow, because even though I’ve survived similar transitions, I can’t build them a raft or carry them across the river. I can only encourage them, shine my own light as brightly as I can into the confusion and the fog, and call out with love to them.

It’s the process of becoming, of losing the conditioning and unneeded fears that hold each of us back.

Surrounding myself with people whose worlds transform at a moment’s notice, whose concept of self and existence fluidly shifts from one shape to another, I surround myself with a circle of dizzying movement. Not knowing from day to day where I stand in their lives, whether I am their closest friend or an annoying remnant of the past – I can be both, or at one moment the latter, the next the former.

I question with as little judgment as I can muster the actions I take, how I affect others’ lives, to look for my mistakes and learn from them, or my goodness and amplify it.

But I live in a world where connections form and break and reform faster than I can think, where the pace of my emotions cannot keep pace with the shifts in feeling and connection between myself and the ones I love.

I’m watching my friends as they tear down and rebuild in their raging storms, reaching out to them as I can to give them light and love and a place to come toward, and I look around and see that all around me is change.

There will be many embraces for hellos and I love yous and goodbyes; many kisses and caresses; many angry words and cold stares; My ground are the spirits that I see in these chosen friends, the indefinable nucleus of being that I could neither describe nor attempt to categorize but that uniquely embodies each of you, that are transmuted by changes to the being but never lost or destroyed.

I am in love with transition. My heart will break a thousand times more, and it will swell to great ecstasies yet another thousand. I will always be learning to let go, that change is the only certainty, impermanence the only permanent truth. I will always fall head over heels and hope for you to stay just a little while longer.

And though I don’t know what tomorrow brings, I thank each of you for every day.

(And I believe that we will still love when we open our eyes one morning to a light of a different quality, that outlines and illuminates those things we didn’t see or understand before, and all that was shifting is solid once more, in a new and old form. We have changed; our eyes have changed; our hearts have changed.

I believe that we will still love, with greater purity and clarity than ever before. To live any less exposed, to live any less open to the wounds being wrong would bring?

Then I would be living a lie; or worse yet, not truly living at all.)

So I’m just going to keep loving you no matter what. Of course I care how it turns out. But whether you choose to stand with me, beside me, or apart, I’ll love.

That’s how I create my place in my world: loving those on the difficult path.