COVID split my heart in half when my sister died of it 3-months ago. It felt as if I couldn’t hold my heart together. But 1-year ago today, my heart was also cracked open, allowing love to flow into it so freely and fully. It felt then as well that I couldn’t hold it together.

I wonder how loss and love can feel so similar?

This second year of COVID has been much different from the first year. In fact, the years propelled me in opposite directions. The first year I aligned inwardly; then, in year two, I was pushed to stretch outwardly.

I started the pandemic single in a home/work virtual environment. I was alone most of the time. I worked with clients through an iPad and created videos building a mind body strength training App I entitled: The Mind Body Adventure.

I was beginning to wonder if I was turning into a crazy cat-lady?! (Only kidding)

I connected with my self. Designing ways to explore the relationship within me to find peace and companionship. Although I imagined connecting with people through my work’s message, it was ultimately to connect deeper within me.

Then things took an abrupt change.

Remember when the original COVID strand was dying down. We thought we were on the other side of a 1-year plague. We had a few weeks, maybe a month, before the new strands started showing up, extending the plague to now 2-years.

In that magical month, as spring awakened, I ran into a man I had met just before the COVID shutdown. We met unexpectedly over and over again! Our sidewalk encounters were so frequent he soon asked me to dinner.

Though still leary to override COVID protocol, I said yes to a house party for two.

A connection with a real, not imagined, person enticed me to stretch outwardly, seemingly away from the trust I had built inwardly. To stretch again toward a trust that the outside world was for me not against me.

For the past year I have continued to stretch into the most fun-loving, nurturing, impassioned love fest I’ve ever known.

As I reclaimed the permission to touch and be touched, breath each other’s air, and abandon caution to fall in love, my heart felt more and more intact. What at first felt like a breaking open became a surrendering. I felt safe with my feelings and with him.

When my sister died, and the split in my heart again overwhelmed me, I thought it was because I was losing someone I love. But what I realized was, I again reclaimed the permission to love her, absent of our vaccination differences which had began to silence our love. I felt safe with my feelings and with her again.

When your heart splits open it brings you in relationship with your deepest feelings, surrendering you to love’s depths. If your relationship with yourself is aligned when this split happens, you feel safe with your feelings and with the depth of love’s roots.

COVID brought me closer to me, to my sister Sherry, and to my lover Anthony. COVID gave me the time and pressure to learn of this vastness of love. COVID has plagued us with suffering, but within all suffering may be a gift.

To heal is to find the gift.

 

Share your Covid gift.