We invited our ghosts in with a gesture now long forgotten. They have been haunting us ever since. We love our ghosts for how they ride us, making us feel like weaker versions of ourselves, defeated. We are such curious creatures for how much we love what we dislike. We protest against such truths, but there it is.

A gnawing sense that all is not right in a marriage, we tell ourselves that it could be worse, or how we swallow so much and brush aside what offends our hearts until we turn ’round to find ourselves dunn-hearted, isolated, and alone in our theater of ghosts. Jobs we love to hate, politicians, the line at the store, the broken clock, computer, or way home…we love to hate it all. Why?

It takes great love to not hate ourselves for this, but to summon that love that, when felt, extends to everything it touches, including ourselves is one of the kindest of things we can do not just for ourselves, but for the good that will come to those around us. We take those parts of ourselves, in love, like how a parent loves their child, in order to show ourselves the way to a better place, where the ghosts are free to live their truer lives – no longer unknowingly grasped within our hearts and bodies, no longer held to a less than perfect expectation that our underwhelm has trapped them in. In so doing we appeal to the greater lights of our becoming to incrementally find our way home – which is itself a constant process as we go. What once was profane is rendered sacred, what was empty is now full, and what was forgot is remembered.