All of my friends had stopped loving me. My husband no longer slept beside me. I cried for a while and then I realized that there was someone beside me - or more accurately, INSIDE of me. I was there. I was not alone after all.I'm coming back to add a few thoughts about this...I want to try and capture a few things before they slip underwater, out of reach... because they will.This sort of salty self-excavation tends to hide. I want to explore these questions:Why was this comforting?Where was I before?Wasn't I ALWAYS there - with myself?What had changed?And how did it change things?So, first - No, I'm not always there - always here - with myself.I'm... somewhere else.There is this image of a man with his head inside a computer. Maybe you've seen it. That's where I am sometimes. But mostly, I'm... not here. Which is to say that my thoughts are not here. The gaze of my attention is not here and, as our 'self' tends to follow that gaze, I have the experience of being somewhere other than here.Where am I when not here?I am daydreaming over to next year when things will be easier financially or looking back to last week when a friend hurt my feelings or skipping ahead a few hours into this afternoon when I have to pick up the groceries. My body is here - making notes, (half) listening to my husband, flipping through a magazine but "I" - the fullness of my presence - is fragmented at best, elsewhere at the extreme.When I had that dream, which bled into a kind of waking (and weeping) waking experience, I was also 'not here'. I was evacuated and needy - empty and alone.My attention was out searching for the lost friend, the husband who actually was sleeping in another bed last night (because he works late and did not want to disturb me.)When I am out searching, I am trying to complete something that feels incomplete. I am leaving home, as it were, to look forI am leaving home, as it were, to look for home. Which makes no sense - unless you are Dorothy Gale from Kansas, or me, or any other human being currently living in this age of self-abandonment.(And by the way, I don't actually believe in this name - the real name for our time is 'the age of love emerging" but abandonment is its shadow name. What I mean is, abandonment is the shadow name of love.)What I mean is: the more evacuated we feel, the more we are awakening to our feeling life. Emptiness reaches for fullness as thirst reaches for water.So, self-abandonment reaches for self-love. And so, this morning, waking with no one but myself beside - and INSIDE - me, I had to stop searching. I had to circle back. I had to do this because no one else could. I saw me there, crying and alone and my heart opened to me, and I came home.That's what I mean.Love emerged from me toward me. And in order to source that love, I had to tap into the wide pool of love inside of which we all swim. I had to became love, emerging into love.I was there.Fully present to the love that I am - even when need rises. Willing to love myself, as I am.