Friday Dispatch: Love Is the Container
Not everything has to make sense
Friday greetings,
This week, I wrote two very short things. You may have seen them elsewhere, but in case you didn’t, I’m sharing here.
Next time you look in the mirror at those deep grooves between your eyebrows and think, "I look ancient," remember the redwood trees and the canyons, the glaciers and the great-great-grandmothers. See how that affects or alters your perception.
Sometimes when you flow inside
a mighty current,
the mystery ushers you
to where you belong.
Let it.
This week, the sun finally came out.
This week, I spent a few days hanging with my mom while my dad was at some meetings in NYC. We shopped. We walked. We talked and laughed. We ate and napped. We erranded and kibbitzed. I showed her how to listen to Joan Baez on Spotify. We couldn’t get the TV to work. Well, we did get it to work, but it was stuck on CNN. Only my dad knows how to work the remotes. Why are there two remotes? I will never understand.
Our time together is funny and poignant and lovely and easy and honest. I cherish it.
I was the child who didn’t want anyone to be upset.
Guess what? I became the adult who didn’t want anyone to be upset.
I’ve come a long way. I am a work in progress.
Prac-tice:
Two syllables containing a multiverse of subtlety, as intricate and nuanced as the workings of the body itself. One thing I have learned and experienced is that acceptance of complexity, imperfection, contradiction, and even confusion creates more space. And more space equals more curiosity, more ease, even inside of tension or disagreement or conflict – things that for a long time I had an underdeveloped capacity to tolerate, much less sit with and experience and move through in healthy (or at least not detrimental) ways.
Easy? No.
Knowing that love is the container helps.
Love is the container.
The writing this morning toggles between micro and macro, inner and outer, tiny and vast. Maybe it’s that this is how I situate myself in space and time, ultimately remembering that here and now is the best and only place to drop an anchor.
The anchor?
Love again.
And breath.
Two days ago, chatting with my daughter and my mother, about childhood memories, I remembered learning about synonyms, antonyms, and homonyms in maybe second grade. Blew and blue, here and hear – what could be more delightful to my eight-year-old self? (Or my 50-year-old self, apparently?)
Maybe love and breath are synonyms.
Maybe antonyms are opportunities to dwell between, to ask questions, to listen.
Aviva read to us from a journal entry. Her writing – the rhythm and cadence of it, the quality of her observations, the way she sees with her heart and listens with her body – swept through me. Awe.
When I’m scared, I lose language. It’s a form of freeze.
Writing morning pages helps me with this. Just keep your hand moving, I tell myself, keep moving, move through it, let the moment happen, whatever it is that brings me to bewilderment. Be with it. Let it be. Let.
Antonyms: Let/block. Allow/refuse. Accept/reject.
Synonyms: Let, allow, accept. Block, refuse, reject.
Now, dear reader, for better or for worse, you are deep inside of my morning brain. I have gone full-on stream of consciousness. I do that sometimes. Forget about anything linear, any kind of narrative, and just go with whatever words come out without making anything fit together.
We spend so much of our lives trying to make things fit, make it make sense – maybe that’s why sometimes this way of letting language hold me is a kind of counterbalance to the work of that.
I’m sitting in my den drinking coffee, the “Dawn” roast I picked up yesterday from that café with the great wallpaper and the strings of paper hearts hanging in the sun-drenched front windows. Chupie is snoozing in her bed at my feet. M.J. is still asleep. In a bit, I’ll do some yoga or take a short walk in the woods, where the light is just now coming up. Then I’ll head back over to my parents’ house.
Not everything has to have a point. Not everything has to be neatly labeled and rendered meaningful. I say this because my impulse is to do just that. I mean, who doesn’t love that feeling of all the pieces fitting together, like the satisfaction of completing a puzzle, everything in its place?
Maybe I allow myself to write this way, even if it’s nonsensical, precisely because it’s nonsensical. Because it helps train me to be with the unresolved parts of life, without feeling like I need to fix anything (including myself).
This is how my writing becomes a practice for something else entirely. Do you see?
Sometimes I get so in my head that I need to remember to breathe. This is why I move into the body.
To breathe is love.
My Grammy would say, “God is love.”
So: Breath is love and love is God and God is breath.
And with that, I’m wishing you gentleness on this Friday.
Shabbat Shalom and love,
Jena
What a lovely start to the morning!
Nice Jena! I loved reading this! 💕