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Lava Love

Posted on February 10, 2020 by dragonspitapothecary


Our son and his friends have this game they call “the floor is lava.” When playing it the object is to not touch the floor or area that is “lava” and reach the other end of the space quickly. Sometimes this means crawling on furniture, dashing across really fast or distracting your opponents so you can get ahead of them. They giggle, laugh and it ends up in a wrestling match almost every time. I have often passed through this with comments they are melting in lava!


When we brought home some lava rocks from our summer vacation last year in Hawaii I put them in a decorative bowl on our kitchen table. Often one of us will be touching these rocks, talking about what a good time we had or how cool the lava really is in real life. It’s dark, bumpy and hard to believe it was molten hot where we wouldn’t be able to marvel at it in our hands. It seems hard to picture this simple black rock being at one time so hot it was liquid and scorching of everything it touched.


Lava is a powerful beast. It destroys everything in its path leaving barren land that is covered in ash and steam. From these ruins complete islands form, such as Hawaii where my family brought home pieces of these permanent lava. Hawaii is exquisite and beautiful with so many exotic things it’s hard to imagine it once was a place of ruin and nothingness. Now it is a great place of beauty that provides vacationers a place to visit and residents a place to call home. How incredible a transformation indeed.


We can use our own devastation, ruins and harshness to shape us into beautiful creatures. We can in fact become our own islands of beauty, grace, sensuality and respite for others. All because we walked through lava of life’s storms and let it shape us. So often we see disasters as these endings where nothing can surely grow again and yet it always does. Those small spouts of life emerge eventually and turn once desolate places into havens of beauty.


We have all encountered devastation in our lives through breakups, bad endings, failed marriages, problems at work, loneliness, physical and mental illness and more. Some of these life problems can seem as if there is no hope of ever having a simple good day ever again! In the stress of a life storm it can really feel like it will never end and I will wonder how I’m going to make it through this time. Yet I always seem to make it through. It may seem to rage on forever but it does eventually subside in fierceness and I can find a way to catch my breath. There have been times in my life as I’m sure there have in yours where you wonder and worry how it could possibly turn out ok at all. As moms and wives we always have some worry for our children and if we’re doing right by them and our family on top of worrying about our jobs, homes and just all the stuff we like to shoulder.


As we think about the lava that has ripped through our lives and destroyed everything in its path whether that’s relationships, homes, careers and more we can often just get stuck seeing the ruins. The loss of what was once there and is now completely wiped away. This is painful and causes us grief we feel deeply. Our tears running down our face uncontrollably and we are at a loss for words to express this hurt we now feel.