My earliest memory of love. Like all early childhood memories, it has a hazy dreamlike quality. It’s one of those childhood stories that was repeated dozens (hundreds) of times by my parents. It is still repeated today.
In the dream I’m inside my grandmother’s farmhouse on her eighty acre subsistence farm. The last house, five miles back on a gravel road. Not that the paved road had any traffic either. I’m standing in the corner of the hallway between the kitchen and the parlor. The propane fired furnace is mounted in the floor beneath my feet. Most of the room is well above the level of my head. I have to look up to see anything. My grandmother kneels down and asks “Who do you love”?
I reply “I love EVERYBODY…”.
It’s deep in my memory for a more physical reason. Sometime before my earliest memory, I fell on that floor furnace. I have a scar on the palm of my left hand. It extends from below the base of my wedding band finger, crossing perpendicular first the heart line and then the head line. The scar continues toward the base of my palm joining the fate line (not everyone has one of these) as it turns from diagonal to parallel about a half inch before they both run dead-end into the diagonal life line.
I often run the fingers of my right hand across the scar in my left palm. What will it take to live my life in a way that my heart, my head, my fate, and my life are all in perfect alignment with “I love everybody…”.
It takes Attempted Love.
– Will Hard, Publisher – Attempted Love