Livin’ on Love

What if you could love more easily and more profoundly? What if presence paved the way?

I see wildflowers and think of Nicolas.

Early in my road trip across America, I propped open my truck door with my foot, and struggled with a box of books. I hauled them into the Black Cat bookstore in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

Inside the store, Nicolas waved a copy of Change Your Life Through Travel at me. “Is this your book?” Nicolas asked. “Check this out. My band is called Traveling Tree and we’re passing through town. How about we play for you to open your book signing today? It just seems right.”

They did, and we all enjoyed their music so much, we asked them to play more.

One week later, while visiting Austin at the same time as Traveling Tree, I told Nicolas I was going to drive in Texas Hill Country to see wildflowers in full bloom. He asked if he could join me.

As we searched for wildflowers, he told me of his partner of almost twenty years. At 41, she was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease. He told me how he got to love her the last years of her life.

How he bathed her, learned to brush her teeth “just hard enough so it would work and soft enough so it would feel good.” How he would carry her to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Love her. Hold her.

Every evening, he would prepare dinner, bring out the plate to show her the foods, before putting them in the blender.

One night as he did this, he looked at her and said, “I must have kissed those lips one million times.”

“That would make me a millionaire,” she said immediately.

“We didn’t have much in the way of material things,” Nicolas told me.

But his sweetheart would tell him toward the end of her life, “We have everything.”

I wanted to see myself in Nicolas’s story. When it comes to loving, was I loving large enough? In the smallest of ways too? With enough depth and breadth and possibility?

I see wildflowers and think of Nicolas.

3 suggestions to spark, or sustain, this path to presence:

1. Love others in big and small ways every day. Presence makes love more powerful – and possible. Can you really love in this moment if you’re not present? When you are fully present, love can flow through you. You have felt it before. Don’t you want to nourish it? Tending the garden of presence will help it blossom. Like Nicolas demonstrated presence in his actions, behavior and state. 
2. See opportunities to love. With your partner, child, parent or friend, can you seek new ways to express your love? Even with strangers, can you find a new way to connect today? 
3. Cultivate loving presence. Do you have a touchstone to remind you to love with presence? Looking into the whites of someone’s eyes? Speaking their name? Seeing wildflowers?  Like love, presence can bloom on every hillside – if we plant it there or let it grow.

Jillian Robinson is on a mission! To have personal development taught as commonly as math and science. Mindfulness/Presence is being taught in some schools today. It’s a beginning! Imagine if kids were taught personal development topics all the time. How different would our lives be – personally, within families, communities, our world? If there’s anything Jillian can do with your organization or if you or your organization can aid in this mission, please email Jillian@JillianRobinson.com. Jillian advances this mission through media production, speaking and certified high performance coaching. Thank you for being part of this mission.