Episode 13: Loving
Hi everyone, I hope you’re doing as well as you can be this week. Our poem takes a deep dive into love today, specifically all the things it might and might not be. How far outside the box can we take the concept of love, especially on the heels of Valentine’s Day and Family Day? Since love is such a critical element of our well-being and mental health, this poem offers a few of my thoughts on what love means, to both broaden and deepen how we think about it—namely as a central current in our lives.
I’ll share it with you now:
We already know that love isn’t
cherry red and bubble gum pink.
Loving is verdant, brown, black,
polychromatic and slows
when we’re on fire.
Love is not our illusion of being
the only ones who can do it.
Loving is looking through a one-way door
into ourselves (and therefore the world),
choosing to never go back, all while
knowing we can’t anyway because we could
never grant consent to ourselves to love.
And yet, loving is saying yes anyway.
Loving is letting love imagine via voice
in our throat, pen, paintbrush, and hands,
with grace amid tending sticky webs of
crises and our responses to them.
Love is saying I choose
your life and your right
to live long enough to fight.
Love is leaning into that which
won’t leave you; not letting it leave you.
Challenging it to a staring contest.
Looking it in the eye when the world
says seeing other souls staring
back wastes, pays, spends too much.
Loving is knowing that love is too large
to fit any form we bind it in,
but still trying to electrify
love’s thread in others by
creating anyway—living if only to
deepen love where we can.
Love is the way to live
with everything our pasts
may never be able to give,
even to today’s us and we
over here, not over there.
Love imagines love when
it isn’t there or we can’t find it
in todays or yesterdays. And
this is enough, plenty even,
sometimes.
Loving is natural law’s stilt—
the one we follow before we ever
knew what it was, the way we
fell before we ever understood
apples and gravity and math.
Loving is thinking about
whether to use the claw
or the face of the hammer
every single time you find
a loose nail.
Love is the seed-saturated core
that our laws lack and need
the way plants rely on fungi,
inseparable now,
so that we can find meaning
and interpret and heal tension,
through pain in power’s house.
Yet, the question of our lives is always
with us: unlike gravity, can we choose
to break this law of love? Do we have
the choice not to follow it?
Perhaps the true form of loving is agility:
never forgetting to ask those two questions
and tallying how many times we’ve answered,
“Yes, but here’s how many times we haven’t.”
Breathe the words in. What do they make you feel or think? How did they connect with your senses? What colours or symbols did you notice? What meaning did you draw? Metaphors? Interpretations? Clarity? Messages?
