Beloved

Late Fragment

And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

Raymond Carver, A New Path to the Waterfall

What is it we want in life? As I age, the clearer the answer becomes. To be loved … and to give love in return. I could sit in a house of gold, write with a diamond pen, on the finest sheets of paper. But what would this matter… if I was not beloved?

I don’t just mean romantic love. That may happen, that may not. I mean to give and receive love from an other. From a friend, a colleague, a neighbour, someone in my family, a pet. The most life saving love I have received has not always been from humans, but from animals. Devoted and caring, following me on paths, even into hated water, because they would not leave me…such is their love.

I have walked through some really difficult times. But it was the love of others… and my choosing to receive their love and to love them, that helped walk me through. Sometimes it was not even someone I knew. It was a someone in a book, a film, a song: a life lived but hard time shared helped me to feel that I am not alone. Friends present, or not, got me through storms, warmed me in the winter, brightened the sunniest days. It was the connection and that mattered.

There is risk. The beloved may remove themselves. They may move away, fade away, turn away, pass away. The pain of love lost can be unbearable…at the time. But is it not ‘better to have loved and lost/ Than never to have loved at all‘ (Alfred Tennyson – In Memoriam). For though we may lose the object we loved, we gained the assurance that we were loved. Cared about. Mattered. Noticed. That we were beloved on the earth.