Love and Devotion
Another day, another airport, another adventure. Sometimes, there's a new and unexplored destination to go to; other times, it's going home or to some place a bit more familiar. Regardless, the cycle of rushing to wait, to being captive to external events and processes is something I'm familiar with. It's a lot of noise that can be overwhelming should you not be prepared for it.
Airports are interesting intersections of humanity. The chaos, the excitement, the various stages of suspended belief over delays, the babble of children, the obnoxious oversharing of business professionals...stop me if you've heard this all before. From my perch here in Boston, I can see and hear plenty and it's bemusing and, at stages, worthy of noise-canceling headphones.
But what about those heliotropes you've graced us with at the beginning, you say?
Like I said, I travel to places that are more familiar with some frequency. In this case, I'm headed home to see my mother. Life's been busy for her, what with her eldest getting married (again), decisions being made on the next stage of her life, ensuring the various pieces of her legacy are all "just so," and encouraging relationship with the remaining time she has. She's aging but not old, if that makes sense.
Heliotropes are symbolic of love and devotion?and what better to bolster that trait than to head home to the woman who raised you? I'm grateful for these moments to be with my nuclear family, just as I'm grateful for the collected time I get with my wife in Ireland and my kids in Boston. There's a devotedness to this family ideal that dictates where I go and how I operate.
Love and devotion certainly isn't always centered on the family that raised you. There's enough to each of our stories that would highlight the difficulties in our experiences in having to "deal" with them. Families are not always worth the love and time we spend; they can be toxic just as much as they can be healing.
In this day and age, when there are so many manufactured wedges that seem to come between people, the extra blows driven home by those whose love and devotion carries more weight is especially painful.
But when you find your "family" or your center, those people who can unmake you to build you back stronger, it builds an incredible driving force (neé devotion) in your heart to them. This isn't to say that we can't find this in animals too; I'd argue that perhaps their unwitting innocence and emotiveness is more pure than we could ever find in our bipedal compatriots. Wherever and with whomever, the fact remains that love and devotion are powerful driving forces.
I'll be boarding soon and, as I watch the clock plod ever onward, I want to challenge you in light of these beautiful, little heliotropes. Taken separately, a heliotrope flower doesn't amount to much. It's smaller than a thimble though no less beautiful for what it is. It engenders the delicacy of nascent love and devotion. As you see it in collective, the full bloom so to speak, you begin to see what a powerful colour it lends to any moment. You see all the petals of community come together and, while separate and distinct in their own right, there's a gravity in its togetherness.
My challenge, then, is this:?grab a piece of paper and draw your connections. Draw your version of a heliotrope with dots and lines, connected by the love and devotion you have for each other. It doesn't matter if it's one bud and nothing more.?We all start somewhere.?I can imagine that, with everything in this world pressing in like it has been, the need for this connection, for understanding our love for others and devotion to them, is going to be tested and tried more than we could imagine.
As you enter this week, let your love and devotion to each other grow and strengthen and become even more beautiful.
May it ever be so.
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