Book Description

These are stories of All-Kinds-of-Love: cat love, family love, romantic love, erotic love, friendship and community love, love of work, love of home, love of nature, love of art, love of justice, love of spirit, broken love, mistaken love, and eternal love. From finding and losing and finding a girlhood Jesus to fighting racial injustice in the old South to thirty years of radical loving in flowery San Francisco to adventuring to live on the edge of the wild high-desert mountains, this is one feminist Everywoman’s journey on the Trail of the Open Heart. The dedication from the story “Mistakes of the Open Heart” gives a taste of the book: I dedicate this story to my loving mistakes on the trail of the open heart, the-ones-who-got-away. To Michael, my first friend in San Francisco, who was in love when I was free, and free when I was in love, and lovingly married when I was free again. To Charles, my Rainmaker. To Tim, the first lover who made me feel beloved. To Doug, my kindred spirit who held hands with me in the convent. To Steve, who dumped me on the Winter Solstice, but still wrote to tell me he loved his Hanukah present of seven stories. To David, a sweet guy who just wanted to be my friend and sing with me on the trail. And to Paula, best friend and adventure buddy of my youth, who said that one of us should have been a man and knew that neither was willing to volunteer. From you lost neverwhere or nevermore lovers, and from the unnamed others (including the bad guys), I have learned hard lessons. You taught me humility and respect for the needs of others. You taught me compassion in situations in which I was the rejector instead of the rejectee. You taught me to allow every relationship to assume its natural form, and that just because people love each other does not mean that they are meant to be together. You helped me learn that the true source of all my love is me. You taught me that part of being an attractive woman may be attracting experiences that I didn’t expect. You taught me to take responsibility for assessing when a person may be impulsive and unreliable, and to take responsibility for acting on that knowledge. You taught me that emotional fluency is not necessarily emotional responsibility. You taught me that men who declare that they have been my lover in many lifetimes probably jerked me around in all those other lifetimes too. You taught me to balance the romantic with the rational and not to mistake neediness for passion. You taught me to count the cost of a relationship and decide if I am willing to pay that price—all of it—and still not get what I want. I learned that most people love as well as they know how at the time, given human imperfection in giving love and human imperfection in receiving it. I learned that sometimes love is deeper without sex, and sometimes friendship is more loving than love. I learned that love is everywhere, here and now, and is not restricted in form. I learned that life is ultimately a great Mystery, and that what we have to give and teach each other may be beyond our immediate comprehension. You, my mistakes of the open heart, led me to experience the tremendous peace and clarity that comes from giving up, absolutely, on an unworkable situation. You helped me to learn that I can survive the death of an illusory self-in-relationship and be reborn to new possibilities, an ever–widening horizon of life. You have helped me to become a woman of wisdom, a woman who has learned to make good love and good friends when I can, and learned to make the scraps into enlightenment soup.