Hi 🚶‍♀️ Anita,
It’s powerful to hear how you’ve reclaimed your ability to move and become ‘the walker’ in your own life. We all have different ways of relating to and finding the ground beneath us. I’m glad you found a way to stand and keep moving forward.

We have come full circle!

If presence is the still point, the silent canvas upon which the messy paintings of our lives are layered, then the ‘quiet tension’ of unconditional love finally resolves. We see that love is not a feeling we generate or a benchmark we hit, but a sustaining reality we simply inhabit.

To say that presence is our destiny is to admit that we are moving toward a total transparency, where the ‘smoke and mirrors’ of our evaluations finally clear. In this light, the ‘I’ and the ‘You’ aren’t separate entities negotiating a contract; they are the intimate immediacy of a single, infinite gift. We are being poured out into one another. When we are truly present, we aren’t just observing the other person, we are returning to the love that was our origin all along.

The phrase unconditional love has always carried a quiet tension for me. (so I thought I’d try dancing with the words to see where they might land)

In my observation, the pursuit of being “unconditionally loving” all too often leads to immense pressure. The moment we ask for unconditional love, from ourselves or others, we turn it into a rigid benchmark, a condition one must meet in order to be considered “good” at loving or even being loved. In this way, unconditional love can quickly become one heck of a condition.

Part of this comes from the nature of language itself. The moment we say “I love you,” we create an “I” and a “you.” Love slips into relationship, and relationship easily becomes evaluation. “I love you because…” becomes the contract. Then comes the moral correction: “I must love you without…” Now love is no longer something lived, it becomes something managed.

We begin watching ourselves: “Am I being unconditional enough right now?”

In that moment, a split forms. We are no longer with the other person; we are standing beside ourselves, judging our ability to love. What began as connection turns into performance.

What if, instead, we understood ‘unconditional love’ as Presence?

Not a standard to achieve, but a way of being.

When love is Presence, the pressure eases. It is no longer about maintaining a moral ideal, but about arriving—again and again—at what is actually here. To be present is to see the other person as they are: their habits, their evasions, their peculiarities, the parts we don’t fully understand. And to meet that without the immediate reflex to fix, improve, or measure them against who they should become.

Presence is not passive. It is attentive, responsive, quietly engaged. It allows care to arise without forcing it into shape. In that kind of seeing, conditions temporarily fall away, not because they’ve been solved, but because they aren’t being imposed. The past loosens its grip. The future softens. There is only this person, as they are, in this moment.

Of course, none of us can live there all the time. We are human. Our nervous systems scan, compare, react. We evaluate constantly.
But perhaps the practice shifts here. Not toward perfect, unconditional love, but toward a willingness to notice when we’ve left presence and to return.

The “condition” is no longer that love must be flawless. It becomes the willingness to come back when we’ve drifted into judgment.

Seen this way, unconditional love is not a free pass for harmful behavior that it to often becomes. Presence does not blur clarity, it sharpens it. When we are not clouded by resentment or idealization, we can see another person more honestly, both their limitations and their beauty.

And from that clarity, a different kind of choice becomes possible: not “How do I love you perfectly?”, but something quieter and more grounded – Is this a reality we can stand within?

Hi Starlight

’m so sorry for being confusing. I want to be very clear: I am not saying you need to find a way to forgive. Your boundaries and your anger are completely valid, especially given what you’ve been through.

My “worry” was less about the specific events and more about how the words we use to frame such events can unintentionally trap us. In my own experience, I’ve used the words “I will not forgive” as a way to say (without really noticing) that “I will use anger to protect myself.” It turned out to be incredibly exhausting and, honestly, it didn’t actually protect me, it just kept me tethered to the pain. To be clear I’m not saying your are doing that, only that that was the ‘source’ of a concern, triggered by the topic heading.

Let us bring it back to the Art. As an artist, I was wondering if exploring the words like “forgiveness” or ‘block’… could be a way to unblock your creativity? Not to change how you feel about the past, but to see what a ‘word’ might looks like. Does it have a shape or a color? Is it a cage, a stone, or a breath? What might it look like, to look at the world though the shape being drawn? Investigating the “spell” of a word visually might be a way to move it out of the mind and onto the heart?

Hi Starlight1 – great name

And great question. We often use ‘unforgiveness’ as a placeholder for a boundary, but it may not be the thing we think it is.

A boundary is a fence you build to keep yourself safe; unforgiveness is often a heavy stone you carry to remind yourself why the fence is there. You don’t need the stone to keep the fence strong. And I think its also important to remember that forgiveness doesn’t make what happened okay, and it certainly doesn’t remove accountability. It can, however, change your relationship to the event and to your own heart.

Words, when we’re not careful, and I speak from experience, can become like ‘spells’ we cast over ourselves. When we say “I don’t forgive,” the mechanical mind takes that as a literal command to stay in a permanent state of defense and anger. Many wisdom traditions warn us about this: when the mind gets stuck in these rigid, automatic definitions, it eventually ‘hardens the heart’ to protect it. We then become ‘stuck.’

Such a definitive stance on a concept like forgiveness, while completely justified by your pain, might be the very spell keeping your creativity blocked. Yet what if forgiveness was defined as ‘releasing the weight so I can breathe,’ rather than ‘letting them off the hook’? I feel that breaks the cycle; it stops you from being tethered to the stone while you tend your fence.

As for your question about art… yes! I think it can!

For me, this ‘wrestling’ with words like forgiveness is exactly where the creative work begins. You could explore this visually: What does a ‘mechanical’ thought look like compared to a ‘living’ one? How would you paint the weight of a word versus the space of a breath?

Instead of waiting for the block to go away so you can make art, use the art to investigate the block. Turn the struggle with ‘forgiveness’ into a study of shapes, weights, and colors… and perhaps tears. That may be how you avoid being the victim of a word and start being the creator of your own narrative?