March Newsletter: A Letter From Love

(For this month, I'm sharing my first foray into two-way prayer, or as Liz Gilbert calls them, "letters from love". You write the question, then wait to get written back to. I've continued this practice daily since this one.)

Love, what would you have me know today?

Today, when you typed this question out, you looked at it and cried. Or rather, you did your best attempt to try and cry, letting out sobbing breaths as you massaged your dry eyes. The only things that came up were: This sucks. It hurts. It’s cold. So you went back to your bedroom, turned the space heater and electric blanket on, and got back into bed. You asked the question again, in your head: Love, what would you have me know today? You waited for stillness, peace and clarity to come, and instead you felt sick to your stomach. Eventually you turned the podcast back on you’d been listening to, around the same time that the workers at the apartment next door to yours turned their leaf blowers on. You turned up the volume on your computer and listened as Liz Gilbert talked to the hosts of We Can Do Hard Things about the mystical power of love. Amanda Doyle was about to read her letter to love, and you hoped it might spark something inside yourself. Just as she began to read, suddenly the whine of the leaf blowers reached a deafening pitch. The invisible leaf blower guy had to be right outside your window, or from the sound of it, right beside your bed. You gave up, turned the podcast off, and listened to the awful, stuttery leaf-blower engine.

That was the right choice, because that leaf blower guy was not hired by the apartment next to yours - he was an angel sent by me directly to your window in order to convey this message to you. Sometimes we get peace and stillness. Sometimes we get that hour at the beach, looking into the perfect blue waves. And it’s beautiful. And sometimes, we get the leaf-blowers outside the apartment while your favorite podcast blasts ads you can’t skip because you’re lying on your stomach with a heating pad on your shoulders. And you know what? That’s pretty fucking funny. And I know you like to laugh.

That’s the thing: I made you to experience both things. I made you to like both things. The beauty of stillness, and the comedy of commotion. The richness of the inner soul, and the ridiculous absurdities of what people do every day. I made you to like both and choose neither, to hold and carry both. When you miss that inner richness, and you cry for it, those tears are the start of laughter. They carry the water of that deep ocean of stillness into those lives of chaos that you love so much. You bear that water for everyone who sits down to try and be still, and instead hears the sounds of leaf-blowers. When you sit and listen to that leaf-blower, you’re hearing it with all of them, for all of them. Someday, there will be a beach, there will be a sunrise, there will be something you never even thought of that will bring you back into that stillness. Today, there are leaf-blowers, and letters from a ridiculous love that bring tears to your eyes, tears that feel joyful this time. Trust me: life is funny.