Hello loves!
Welcome to those joining for the first time! This is a monthly love letter exploring the concept of love as outlined in bell hooks’ “All About Love.” We’re currently investigating love as a verb - the act of nourishing oneself towards the soul.
This month I offer a way of loving oneself by way of another. All this thinking about just ourselves can be too insular and exclusive. As Tyler Durden declares in “Fight Club”: “Self improvement is masturbation.” Well, maybe, maybe not. But he brings up an interesting point - all this concentrating on the self begs the questions: what about the rest of it? How much are we really living in the world if we’re subsumed by the makings of our own?
There is a reason that nothing exists without it’s opposite. In order to know light, we know it in relation to it’s opposite - the dark. In order to define an apple, we define it as what it is - a fruit - and what it is not - a vegetable.
I contend that we cannot know ourselves until we truly know another. Seeing someone, some place, some thing as itself provides a mirror. We notice what between us and the other is similar, what is different. Appreciating what is outside ourselves, whether we like it or not, is fundamental to a healthy ego and critical to maintaining our collective humanity.
This other, this mirror, can also be a past version of ourselves. I tend toward loathing and dismissal, unable to forgive my mistakes. But that is unwise, for these other women are important to see clearly, to accept, to learn from.
As Joan Didion writes in “On Keeping a Notebook”:
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4:00am of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends.
Keeping on “nodding terms” with my flaws also mitigates my adverse reaction when I notice them in others.
How we treat ourselves amounts to how we treat others, and vice versa.
As the world slowly reopens, may we do so with bigger hearts, with more space for the different people we may meet, for the different selves we may have become over these last 18 months, for the people we are always re-becoming.
For those of us that have survived COVID, may we embrace a new, raging desire to live and all that truly means.
July Heat
My raging desire to live is personified in summer travel, like many vaccinated, fortunate Americans. I’ve started to go crazy inside, still. I want out.
An intuitive whim in April led me (perhaps guided me by stars?!) to my first ever writer’s retreat, hosted by acclaimed poet Jimmy Santiago Baca in Albuquerque, New Mexico the weekend of June 18th. Ever since reading “Women Who Run with the Wolves”, I’ve craved a visit to the desert, which Dr. Estés says mimics the lives of many women (or more likely, vice versa), sparse and coarse above ground but rich and layered, dense and tenacious below the surface.
And I knew I’d find the other there in many forms:
The dry kind of heat that sits on the skin like a weighted cotton blanket one’s too lazy to take off, the opposite of the wet humid kind that coats the East coast in summer.
Miles of dry land meeting the horizon instead of the lush treetops of my Arlington, VA view or ocean waves of my family home in Boston.
Spicy homemade salsas with tomatillos and green hatch chiles as opposed to my usual Tostito’s in a jar.
Humans of chicano, indigenous, Mexican, Spanish descent who have dark eyes as opposed to my light ones and speak idioms in a native tongue not my own.
The other version of myself, the artist, the one who spends precious resources fulfilling childhood dreams, honing her craft, taking risks.
All these opposites brought me closer to myself. Made me more whole. I felt sure-footed, calm, even as I drove for hours in unknown land and introduced myself and my work to people I’d never met before. As my new friend and motel neighbor Karl observed when I explained this immediate transformation: “Your spine is unwinding in the Southwest.” And indeed, that is exactly what happened. The Southwest is slow, the Southwest is honest, and the Southwest is rich, particularly in New Mexico, with the history, the culture, and the peoples of two frontiers mixing and cooperating, clashing and re-forming the landscape and the human theater performed as its foil.
Over the course of a week in mid June, I fell in love with the desert, with New Mexico, and with writing. I plan to return next year for Jimmy’s retreat, and the year after that.
And as all artists begin with imitation, I did my best Joan Didion impression by typing up my pages of notes and minutes of voice memos in this unedited “Notes on New Mexico” Google doc to read if you’re so inclined, like she did in her book of travel note collections, “South and West.”
My task now is to continue to practice the love I learned in the desert, to continue to love the woman I am becoming in her many forms.
By sharing the below practice, I hope you do too.
Practice
Jimmy started the first morning of our retreat with a revelatory exclamation: “WRITING IS EASY.” Gasp. What? What about all those books telling us how hard it is, all those programs we can buy to begin? THROW THEM OUT, he says. Yes, writing is easy! Maybe not the discipline part or studying grammar or honing your craft or putting the final editing touches on a poem, but none of these are the actual act of writing itself.
If you love to write, then writing is EASY! A bomb of relief went off. All twenty sets of shoulders in the room relaxed. He gave us permission to stop thinking about the thing and just do the thing. He calmed the perfection-obsessed ego and invited in the soul. He then asked us to do an exercise writing about how easy it is to write. It felt like freedom, and set us up for success as we put our vulnerable work out into our small world over the next two days, some of us for the very first time. It’s no big deal. We are all here because we love to write. Loving to write makes it easy to do. Put the pen to paper and begin.
I invite you to practice discovering a thing you love to do and how easy it is to do it. Writing doesn’t have to be it. It can be cooking, walking, singing, sleeping, stretching, calling your grandma, playing an instrument, tuning an engine, swimming, debating, reading, gardening, gaming, fishing, playing with children or animals.
If you love to do something, the choice to do it is easy.
See what happens:
Come to stillness. Turn your attention to your breath. Take three deep breaths in through the nose, out through the mouth. Option to close the eyes after you read these directions.
Ask yourself simply: “What do I love to do?”
Allow & accept the first thing that arises. Write it down somewhere.
Choose time you have that day to do the thing. Just do it!
BONUS: Write about it. Journal about how easyyyyy it is for you to pick up your guitar and mess around if you love playing, how easy it is to whip up an omelet for yourself if you love cooking, how easy it is to find a local pool or body of water and dive in if that’s your thing, how simple to buy the book you’ve been wanting to read and actually read it. Need a prompt? How about: “I love to X, and doing X is easy. It’s easy for me to ….”
May we get out of our own ways. May we accept the act of love, in whatever form, as easy.
We’re so conditioned to think that in order for something to have value, be worthy, it has to be difficult. No. Life is hard enough as it is.
Let love be easy.
And as always, for some extra love check out our yoga library of movement & meditation recordings to support you anywhere, anytime.
Loving Lately
I had a whole list here and deleted it at midnight last night in favor of a genius comedic musical special my bubsy showed me called “Bo Burnham Inside” (Netflix). Regardless of your opinion of him or the content, I know you can appreciate the incredible time, effort, and artistry in this solo filmed, written, edited, and performed special in a single room during the panic-height of the pandemic.
And here’s some tunes:
Closing Quote
There are situations, moments in life, in which, unawares, the human being confesses great portions of his ultimate personality, of his true nature. One of these situations is love. In their choice*of lovers [human beings] reveal their essential nature. The type of human being which we prefer reveals the contours of our heart.
— José Ortega y Gasset (May 9, 1883–October 18, 1955) in “On Love: Aspects of a Single Theme”, found in Maria Popova’s “Whom We Love and Who We Are: José Ortega y Gasset on Love, Attention, and the Invisible Architecture of Our Being”
Have a wonderful month team. I’d love to know what you’re up to, how you’re feeling. Drop a comment below and tell us. We’re listening.
Following stars,
Colby
This was fabulous and so uplifting! Makes me yearn for the desert hikes in Utah! Thanks for sharing the love.
So wonderfully inspiring, Colbs! I feel the travel bug has bitten thanks to you. Also, love the "I love to do X and X is easy..." prompt. <333