About a year ago now, I started writing a book about love. I don’t care nor claim to be an expert in it’s great mysteries but I do believe it is my chief purpose in this lifetime to celebrate it, and to create spaces where others can do so as well.
While I was writing this book, Death called my father home. No one had prepared me for the reckoning of my heart that that wrought. Perhaps no one could.
I no longer feel I have any time to waste, with love or any other worthy pursuit. I’ve loved writing this material but think this is the best place to call it home from my changing heart. I’ve decided to share them here in a serialization. I like the idea that anyone in the great wide digital universe might stumble upon them, and find a pathway to more love. Because that is all I want. To help people feel loved.
This is the first essay.
To my father, who held all the love in the world in his heart.
To Love Another
In the midst of writing this book, Death took my father home. My love for him was, and remains, as immeasurably gentle, strong, and buoyant as he was in this lifetime. He was everything a daughter wants a father to be: a protector, a confident, a champion, a mentor… But above all of those wonderful roles he played for me, he was one of my best friends. We liked to drive around and talk, get lunch, work or read at the book store…any quiet way to pass the time together. He was 37 years older than me but there was a parity of understanding between us that transcended age or viewpoint. Whenever we were together, it felt like we were two kids just enjoying the day side by side. Perhaps it was like this because our bond was of the spirit, which sits at the surface level when we are a child, as each of ours always did in the presence of one another.
My dad loved flying so much he could usually identify any plane’s make and model simply by hearing the engine in the sky. He wanted his daughters to be powerful as any man, but please still not to get on the backs of motorcycles for his sake. He thought life should be an adventure and that money was cheaper than fun. He never felt like he was doing enough. The suffering in the world wore at his heart. He was often scared. I knew these things not from inference but because he told me them. On all of our lunches and coffees and drives, he would share his inner world freely and peacefully as would I. Although we can never know all of another person’s inner life, I knew as much of my father as I believe it was possible for me to. I knew his lightness and his heaviness; his pride and his shame. It is a kindness few people afford themselves, to be allowed to be seen wholly in both their hopes and their flaws, then asking to be loved amidst them. I think we, as a culture, have cultivated a tendency to hide behind a wall of composure, to believe our emotional reality is impolite. Fathers especially are placed behind this wall, fearful their vulnerability will detract from their roles as guides or protectors. I know my own father had these fears but ultimately decided to step past them. The reward was a strengthening of our connection and of his parental role in my life as an emotional teacher.
His honesty was one of the greatest blessings of our relationship, one I didn’t always understand to be a blessing. Revealing vulnerability with anyone, between parents and children, friends, lovers… can be debilitatingly scary. But amongst everyone loving to you, doing so creates more than simply contentment. As a parent, my dad always granted his loving acceptance as an outspoken, standing rule. In return, I learned how to give mine, both to him and those I would come to love in the future. So the space where we existed together was a sacred one, one where we were both inherently deserving of love.
We have increasingly fewer of these spaces in our life and times; ones where we know we can go to be met with the respect, attention, and care we so desperately need. Most of us live under the pressure to wash ourselves clean of the complexities that make us so attractively human and ironically, so lovable. My father was by no means a perfect man, but he was a brave one. Brave enough to acknowledge he needed to be known and to be loved. His example taught me how to love another.
As spiriting as he was in life, the greatest gift of our closeness and his generous heart came once he had left this existence. I always imagined the loss of him would feel like all of my nerves tied in a knot and ripped out of me at once, both excruciating and numb at the same time. But when his body was finally at rest, I felt not a death but the birth of a love within me so large that I could not see or feel anything else in the early days of his passing. I wept at the beauty and existence of it and the paradox of having to pay for it in loss. As I contemplated the love, I ultimately felt that when he left this mortal plane, he left his earthly love behind for me. Now I must carry both mine and his. His company is gone to me but his spirit is not. His love is not.
It is not my hope that with this work I could teach you the best way to love or to mitigate your pain because I both wouldn’t know how and wouldn’t be particularly qualified to. It is my hope that it can be a tool to assist you in carving space in which you can sit in love, like the ones my dad and I sat together in. That perhaps you can find and grow true closeness to others and yourself within the pages. Then whether love be halcyon or rough, there is never any loss in it. People may leave the space but the love you’ve known does not. This how I’ve cured my lonely heart. If you have one, maybe together we can cure yours too.
I firmly believe that love is not rare, that it is a bursting wellspring just waiting for all of us to tap it. It is also my firm belief that we are all so gloriously lovable if we are willing to reveal ourselves. I hope when you turn the last page of this work, you know that just a little bit more.
Beyond my words, your responses to them, and the ones of those kind enough to speak to me, you will find visual explorations of love by the great artist and my great friend, Olivia Juliet Taylor. In the life of an artist, there are times where another creator comes into constellation with you and it feels as though your souls have been friends for millennia. You see your god in their work, benevolent enough to think to bring you together and suddenly all things make sense. It’s a powerful connection, one my life and writing has been born from completely. I am honored she has immortalized our bond with brush to paper here and know her images will enrich your experience of loving another between these pages and beyond.
Mostly, I wrote this work because I wanted to say I love you. I really do.