A LOVE LETTER
From 42,000 feet.
“If you knew how important you are, you would fragment into a billion pieces and just be light.” - Byron Katie
Dear ones,
I’m writing you from 42,000 feet, flying west on my first cross-country flight in many years. I started to close my eyes and doze, but something inside me was tugging me toward you, on this day of celebrating love (February 14).
Of the piles of lovely holiday cards we got near the New Year, there’s one I’m still thinking about today, six weeks later. It came from a distant friend, a free woman. In a rapid slant script, after a string of other lovely greetings, it said this:
With Love, Dive Deep
I know she meant her sign-off to be with love, and the rest was a directive for the New Year: Dive Deep. But I can’t help but wonder if the whole thing was a directive: With Love, Dive Deep.
OR: Dive deep, With Love.
I know the owner of that handwriting very little, but I’ve come to admire her year by year. She is a free woman. There is something about a genuinely free woman I can’t take my eyes off. There are not enough of them, these gifted ones. But, one day, I will become one.
Another comes to mind: a woman in our community who we see only occasionally. When she appears, it’s the knowing she carries with her I notice more than the details of her face, hair, what she’s wearing, or what she does for work—inconsequential details.
Last November, when we ran into her the week of my daughter’s 13th birthday, she shared that it was her birthday, too. “Scorpios,” I said with a wink. She nodded briefly, then turned away from me.
“We are an ocean,” she said to my daughter, staring directly into her eyes. “Don’t be afraid to go deep; it’s beautiful in here.” She held her hand over her chest.
I felt the room around me still. Stay with it, I willed my daughter, inside my head. Don’t let this wisdom pass you by. The woman turned back to me, smiled, eclipsing everything else in the room, and walked away.
Last week, I got an itch to clean out the books that had accumulated in the corner of my room for years in a thin, towering stack. Elsewhere—in my office, studio, or living room—there are neat stacks on the credenzas or lined up on stylish shelves, organized by color or category. Cookbooks, art books, photography, travel. But here in this corner is the wisdom of the last nine years. The words and voices I let in on the last hours of the day, or the first, by dim lamp light, tucked under my duvet with my toes on a heating pad.
I hadn’t read many of these types of (self-actualization) books before I left New York City nine years ago when my second child was born. Maybe there wasn’t space for them. Or need. But in the vast expanses of a less dense world, there are often more questions than answers (later, we learn that’s as it should be).
In recent years, these teachers and these books (and often podcasts) have been lifelines. Each author, like an angel, arrived just as I needed.
“You have to read this!” I’d send the book or the link to a dear friend or my sisters–titles from Martha Beck, Miguel Ruiz,
, Thich Nhat Hanh, Brene Brown, and Glennon Doyle. Mostly, these notes went unanswered; often, the books I sent were unread. They were perfectly timed in my life but, perhaps, not meant for the other—yet.Among the books, some are earmarked and highlighted. A couple I barely cracked. I’ve reread one or two and found little meaning the second time around, but just as often, the opposite is true––as if the shift inside me had become seismic in spiritual terms, even when it felt like a snail's crawl on the surface.
Recently, I went back to Byron Katie’s The Work—only this time picking up one of her titles I hadn’t seen before: I Need Your Love (Is that true?). You’ll have to read it yourself to get the depth of her message; she talks about how very often, when we are craving and seeking love, approval, appreciation, or attention from others (our spouses, our parents, our children, our friends or our world), we are, in fact, the very ones who need to give it to ourselves.
She asks: I need your love—is it true? Or, is it true or truer that we need our own love? And when we can give it to ourselves freely, the response of the world, even our dearest companions, can not affect us—neither conflate nor deflate us. Neither shake nor make us.
When we are children, we dance when we feel like dancing. Sing when the spirit moves us. We draw, paint, and run naked through the yard. We explore our body and our world, our talents and our whims, without looking around for approval, without seeking love.
Then, someone responds—they tell us we are good or bright or lovely, pretty or wonderous or powerful or talented. And like a drug, we come back for more.
Now, we don’t dance because of how it makes us feel; we dance for love. We write for love; draw for love; cook for love; live for love.
But what if the only love and approval we need is that which comes from ourselves? What if we could go back to living free?
Free women aren’t waiting for a pat on the back or a stamp of approval. I have only recently accepted that, contrary to what society likes to tell us, this freedom doesn’t occur from reaching a certain age, a magic number: 40, 50, even 60. Some women will never achieve it because It happens from self-examining. From going in and going deep.
With Love, Dive Deep.
I’ve got much work yet to do, but I might be closer to this goal than I have been in a long time.
Yesterday, I dropped the pile of beloved, dog-eared books at a local shelter, hoping they find their way to whoever needs them next. It’s not that the work (in me) is done, quite the contrary. But this last book taught me something that all the others combined were trying to say.
Today, I find peace and guidance in my snowy woods walk, the shape of the crystals that form on blades of grass, in the quiet in my head, and in the crunch of my steps. I find it in the voice of God, forgiving, trustworthy, and in the company of my curiosity. I see it in the smile of the freckled baby who lives with our friends in foster care, whose blue eyes gleam with love against his translucent skin, against the odds of his circumstances.
He is not waiting for love. He is love. It is inside him, beaming out to everyone around him and shining back on himself.
Somehow, by the grace of these many teachers, by the grace of God, I’m returning to childhood. To the wonder and awe, to freedom.
I will write to write, draw to draw, dance because I love how it feels to spin, and eat because it gives me pleasure. No one has to like it or approve. Only I do.
The same is true for you. You are a billion fragments of light, each one reflecting love back on yourself if you’ll let it. And that, friend, can light up the world.
xx S
