My commute home from work is long but sometimes it’s surprisingly magical.  Tonight, I was biking home from work and I noticed a heart shaped balloon drifting over some apartments and into the sunset. I stopped my bike, fumbled for my phone and tried to catch a picture of it before it was gone. It moved me emotionally and psychically, just the way Moon in Pisces is supposed to move the soul. The dark heart outlined against the fading light brought back a couple of memories of messages of love from the Universe.  It made me pause and think where I’ve been on this journey of love and where I’m going.

One memory that came to mind is when when I finally let go of an ex that I loved relentlessly for two years even though he  kept me on the back burner. He was living and working in Thailand at the time and I hadn’t spoken to him face to face for at least a year. I called him because I was so love sick over him I had to know if he still loved me.

What I learned from that call wasn’t what I went into it expecting to learn.  I confessed my undying love to him and he turned me down gently. Then I asked what I really needed to know to find peace in the situation.
“Did you ever love me?” I asked
He lowered his voice because he was at work and said, “Yes, I loved you very much.”

And at that moment, the heaviness in my heart lifted and it felt like a my heart could float, like a balloon, from the lightness of liberation.

The next heart balloon swept into my life on a sunny, gusty, chilly February day. It raced down out of the mountains like magic and blew into a parking lot I was passing. It shone metallic pink in the sunlight. I was on my way home to Skype with a man I’d fallen in love with on the internet for the first time. I was so high on love my toes barely touched the ground. It was a sign that love was in the air. And although loving that person destroyed the life I once knew, it’s beautiful moments like that, little signs that in another time and place there was a great love between us, that make it hard for me to regret falling in love with the wrong person.

So I stood there on the sidewalk tonight, connecting the past and present as I tried to capture a good picture of that sunset, shadow heart. And I realized it was a goodbye omen; that I need to let go of the love I still carry to make way for something new.  And the goodbye can be loving and gentle.

I have a temple in my heart dedicated to all the people I’ve loved.  There’s a nicknack for each lost love I keep on itas a trinket, a souvenir, of that time in my life.  And I leave a candle burning in my heart’s temple for each of those that it didn’t work with to honor the memory of what they taught me.. But the only people who have places on that altar are the people I’ve let go of. The altar is a way to put those feelings that I no longer need to rest and honor them with gratitude.

And now it’s time to add another trinket to that altar in my heart.  This one is a hard one to let go of. I’ve been trying for a while but every time I think I’ve done a good job of moving on, I get smacked with a dream that feels more like a telepathic communication than my subconscious mind expressing repressed emotions. But I have to let that go if I want to make room for new experiences.

When I got home I drew a Tarot card to validate my realization. I drew the 3 of Staves and ironically, it looked like me looking up at the balloon. There are new opportunities coming, maybe sooner than I think. I have been drawing the 2 of Cups a lot lately which almost always tells of a romantic connection on the way. I get the message. Until I make up my mind to add another trinket to my heart’s altar, there will be no room in the chamber of my heart of living love to welcome anyone in. And the chamber is so big and empty and dusty now because there has been no reason to enter it. It needs to be lovingly redone in order to make space for the next lesson of love I have to learn.

I wonder how I could date anyone at this time in my life when I’m still nursing the stab wounds on my broken heart. But sometimes we don’t choose when things happen, they just do. I keep telling myself, “It’s probably something metaphorical coming like falling in love with some aspect of yourself.” But the 2 of Cups is so material, so literal, I doubt that. I’ve been working with the Chariot card and more importantly, the ideal of the Spinx. I set up my crystal ball with a picture of an ancient Spinx statue and I asked it to tell me what mystery I have to learn on this path. The mystery is the 2 of Cups. How cryptic.  So in order to discover it, I need to clean out my heart in the same way some people clean out their closets.

So we shall see.