When we give love in ONE particular place, we find liberation when we learn to remain open to the ways in which our love is returned to us from OTHER sources.

One of the most difficult challenges in life is the experience of unrequited love, not only in a romantic context, but also in the realm of friendship.  When we offer our heart to another, and they do not love us in return, we are tempted to feel foolish and embarrassed.  In fact, we often feel we've gotten "burned" by giving ourselves so naively.  However, we can find liberation from the suffering this situation brings when we realize that life   - together with our own core identity  - is actually composed of a whole NETWORK of beings, all of whom are intimately interconnected at their deepest core.  In the context of a Rocky Mountain aspen forest like the one pictured here, we might say that every person and every creature is like a single stem growing in a grove in which every tree is interconnected at the roots.

Interestingly, the Pando Grove in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah is commonly thought to be the largest living organism. It covers 106 acres, and is at least 80,000 years old, although some scientists think it may be up to a million. It is comprised of over 47,000 stems, all of which are tied in to a single root system. This aspen grove serves as a wonderful embodiment of the answer to our dilemma of unrequited love. Accordingly, one of the most important life-lessons we can learn is the realization that - when we offer our love to ONE particular person - we must then remain open to the ways in which we may receive love in return from some OTHER person.  In other words, except in the case of intimate relationship, where both partners are ideally equally in love,  we will remain disappointed with others only if we erroneously expect to receive love back from the same person to whom we first offered it.

Can we remain open to receiving a sense that we are lovable from an attractive stranger's smile, for example, or from an alpenglow sunrise, or from unexpected wildlife we might encounter on the trail? Or perhaps from a liberating insight that suddenly visits us, or from a sense of joy at simply being alive? We may feel our love turned to ash within the recipient of our love when they do not want it, but we find liberation from hurt feelings when we remember to remain open to receive love back from some other creature - or person - composing the vast web of life.  In other words, the solution to our dilemma arises when we take our attention off the ashen aspen tree and place it instead on an unburned tree composing the great grove of the world.  Gradually, it dawns on us that our frequent experience of rejection comes from our habit of construing life too narrowly. We begin to see that we can find peace instead when we understand that the love we receive in return may come from a completely DIFFERENT source!

Photo: Burned and unburned aspen trees; Fern Lake Burn, Rocky Mountain National Park, CO; December 29, 2012