how 2 Love
(work in progress!) (WIP!) (your girl is 4ever learning)
I’ll arrange my thoughts “on Love” as a numbered list - twenty - not in order of importance, but simply for ease of reference like: “Emily, #15 … WHAT THE HECK?”
etc.
Funny to give “advice on Love” (stares out window for 37 seconds).
It’s not advice. It’s an offering - from my adventures on earth - a sample platter - what I’ve seen and felt and learned of Love. Incomplete. Work in progress.
Off we go, humbly:
This quote rings true of Love:
"Among the most beautiful things l've ever heard anyone say came from my student Bethany, talking about how she wanted to be as a teacher, and what she wanted her classrooms to be: 'What if we joined our wildernesses together?' Sit with that for a minute. That the body, the life, might carry a wilderness, an unexplored territory, and that yours and mine might somewhere, somehow, meet. And what if the wilderness - perhaps the densest wild in there - is our sorrow? And if it is, and if we join them - your wild to mine - what's that?.. What if we joined our sorrows, I'm saying... I'm saying: What if that is joy?" - THE BOOK OF DELIGHTS, Ross Gay
When I’m home with my 10 nieces and nephews, and we watch Disney’s “Brave,” and Giselle (10) cuddles next to me, engrossed in the movie, all the while clutching my hand unknowingly - holding it softly, drawing circles on my palm, curving a little closer to me, trusting me unutterably, that is Love. It is Love to be someone’s safest place.
The un-sexy aspects of Love are wonderful. Like how it handles conflict. One question Love always asks (in heated moments; with genuine curiosity): “What does this feel like from your point of view?”
Ok, so the “5 Love Languages?” I’ll propose a 6th: offering personalized music and art and film recommendations. *chef’s kiss*
Platonic Love can have 1,000 dimensions. It’s a prism. It’s magnificent. Our culture is slow to celebrate this, but… we can still revel in a multi-faceted, lifelong friendship. There are more kinds of commitment than just “romantic.”
Note to self: prioritize friendship. Cultivate flourishing friendships with those who adventure toward the same horizon. This flavor of Love will heal you.
Speaking of commitment. Isn’t that astounding? That… through hell, high water, or personal evolution… someone looks at you and says, “I choose you.” and you can be the one who looks at another and chooses them too.
Forgiveness. WHAT THE HECK? That it even exists (?), A WONDER, that it can flood a heart and alter a trajectory and spiral a life upward, and it comes from beyond our selfish proclivities, and to forgive is to Love.
To be forgiven - when we feel the worm of shame - is to know Love, is to be changed. Eye-to-eye: someone saying, “I forgive you, I release you. Let us both be free.”
On that note: freedom. Love is wild because it is antithetical to control. How does a mother carry her child for months, grown from her own body, alive in her womb, and then spend her entire life letting go?!? … because she Loves, and even what comes from our bodies must become its own… a distinct being, Loved as separate, surrendered.
^ Mothers are unbelievable.
I love my Mom.
Love might get angry (very), but it’s not vindictive. It has open hands. This hurts: to let go without calcifying into bitterness. People arrive and they leave, but the Love itself remains with us. We can stand back up in the strength of it.
Open hands receive new gifts, new Love. Fists are sweaty, so relax, ok?
Back to bitterness: it’s tempting. Fury feels more powerful than sadness - an “upper hand.” But anger, if we don’t metabolize it, can change us. Harden us. Shrink us. Bitterness can become a cold, lifeless prison, and we’ll starve for Love in there. We don’t want this.
That prison is locked from within. It is not too late to exit your bitterness.
Every Love evolves. We have our entire lives to grow into the kind of Love we hope to become. Tread lightly & bravely onward.
This, from David Whyte:
“We can never know in the beginning, in giving ourselves to a person, to a work, to a marriage or to a cause, exactly what kind of love we are involved with. When we demand a certain specific kind of reciprocation before the revelation has flowered - we find ourselves disappointed and bereaved, and in that grief may miss the particular love that is actually possible but that did not meet our initial and too specific expectations... The act of loving itself, always becomes a path of humble apprenticeship... where we are asked continually and against our will, to give… in so many different ways, without knowing exactly, or in what way, when or how, the mysterious gift will be returned.”
From bell hooks:
“A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong.”
And one more, from David Whyte:
“Sometimes, you need the ocean light,
and colors you’ve never seen before
painted through an evening sky.
Sometimes you need God
to be a simple invitation
not a telling word of wisdom.
Sometimes you need only the first shyness
that comes from being shown things
far beyond your understanding,
so that you can fly and become free
by being still and by being still here.
And then there are times you want to be
brought to ground by touch
and touch alone.
To know those arms around you
and to make your home in the world
just by being wanted.
To see eyes looking back at you,
as eyes should see you at last,
seeing you, as you always wanted to be seen,
seeing you, as you yourself
had always wanted to see the world.”
That’s it. All 20.
The sum total of my LOVE EPIPHANIES.
Kidding. I could write you an entire book, but I’d keep changing it, because I’m still in the thick of this wilderness of Loving and being Loved and trying to navigate through ecstasy and loneliness and a career and confusion and my family history and social events and Los Angeles and old ties and new tidal waves of feeling and quiet mornings with that one owl hooting and so I’m just going to keep
going.
Take me or leave me as the hilariously deep soul that I am.
And send me your thoughts on my 20 Love thoughts.
Someone recently told me, “You are an enigma,” and it’s true, even to myself.
We are mysteries to one another, to ourselves, and I hope we can wake up from our boredom, our malaise, our stress, our coldness, and forge out into the adventure of Loving and being Loved.
My wilderness is glad to meet yours.
🤟🏼
P.S. FOR INTREPID READERS, HERE IS #21 …
A LETTER TO MY NIECES & NEPHEWS,
someday when your heart breaks:
If you love someone who does not love you back, or who stops loving you - while it hurts, and it might hurt terribly - I pray that you do not confuse their rejection with your worth. I pray that you do not calcify into bitterness. Whatever comes next, do not measure your value by their refusal. Don’t measure their value that way either. It’s hard to avoid doing that. When we love so much, and deeply, we feel the rejection in our cells - it aches.
We curl in or we lash out. We deflate.
Heartsickness has been studied.
You will cry.
You will endure the painful aftermath.
And then you will have to think of what to do next.
That is when you can choose to heal.
Open a window. Don’t let the past fester inside you like it’s all you’re good for. The world is enormous. There is enough Love in it. Love holding us up through all our terrors. Enough Love to fill your heart till it could burst.
We lose sight of this. We plead for Love from one source - dried up, wrung out - we forget the vast abundance.
It takes a shift in attention. Attention to the texture of the earth, on which the sun lands
just so - dappling, dazzling, soft - on which flowers grow, out of which blooms fruit… How startling that delectable grapefruits and melons and tomatoes and mangoes grow out of the dirt and on trees and little plump berries
on vines and grapes and orchards, and doesn’t that feel like someone loving you?
Someone saying, “Come; eat. It grows for you.”
… season after season
You grow too.
When you love someone who does not love you back, your heart will break, and then… it will have space to spread wider, to fit new volumes of love you haven’t met yet.
The past might come to look differently.
You might make peace where your heart once went to war.
Do not be afraid of a broken heart. Take a full breath and carry it with you, into the wide open world - where abundant Love
blooms everywhere.