“I have not fallen in love with a body, but merely a soul, and that has made all the difference.”
~ Christopher Poindexter
A favorite post, as true today, after so much time, as it was when I first wrote it. I didn’t buy tulips or champagne for Thanksgiving, but different flowers and some Coke. Champagne we already have.
Our family now has a new generation of adopted fur babies. The rest of us are older, conversations are deeper. But we still laugh. A lot. And because the years that passed did not pass without harsh edges, the sense of gratitude for small things has grown. It’s funny that love is such a small thing, and also a huge thing. Today, we all have a better understanding of why that is. And also, of why it remains the most important small-huge thing.
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It’s true. You should see my stats. The posts most viewed and read? The ones about the love. Always the love.
Not surprising. Because even on those days you mindfully fill with little happinesses…
…like the buying of tulips and champagne for Thanksgiving…the surrendering of all the comfy spots and pillows on the sofa to cats…the deliberate disordering of books into piles around your bed…the smell of your younger child’s freshly washed hair against your cheek, and the hand of your older one tightly holding on to yours…
…and like the polishing of silverware on a cold, sunny day while remembering those who used each fork and knife and spoon, of the things they said and did when they were real, of their missing and their presence…
…and like a laugh with strangers in a store and surrender to an unexpected kindness…like the allowing of a little dream to paint your soul with big, sloppy, wonderful rainbows…
IF…
that love is missing…you know the one…the one you need for reasons you can never explain or need to understand because they are too beautiful and many…
…then, weary sorrows and lonelinesses come knocking on the door, and enter. And sit quietly in corners, warming themselves next to all the small flames you’ve lit, under your diplomas and next to your checkbook…waiting to sing to you their confessions, looking at you with hopeful eyes…
Because maybe, maybe, you can give them new and sparkly clothes, and each one a happy name…a new name by which they can know themselves as not sorrows or lonelinesses, but little happinesses too.
Yes, the love is why we live.
Why we work. Why we make art and why we clean. Why we celebrate anything. Why we run around stores with shopping lists and carts full of cranberries and little pastries. Why we buy ribbons. Why we suffer boredom and accept getting older. Why we tenderly care for our disappointments until they heal, and gently restore, again and again, the hope that our future errors will be softer on the soul. Why we are willing to risk everything, endure the shackles of patience, and imagine ourselves dancing with hope and wonder, even in the heart of great storms. Why we are willing to understand our own scars and why they are so beautiful.
Yes, it is why we break. And also why we can become unbroken. It’s why we stop singing and why we sing in the first place. Why we have a shadow, and a necessary silence sometimes. It is why we fight, and why we can rest. It is why we dream, and must.
And everyone it seems, always wants to read about, and live, that kind of love, at the center of all the other little happinesses. And everyone cries over the loss of that kind of love, no matter how many other little happinesses they might have around them and be grateful for.
Everyone wants to know, whether they will admit it or not, that this life has a fairytale for them as well. That someone out there will once and for all show them they are special just the way they are…worth waiting for and trusted beyond all the beyonds of all the errors and time…
…that all they ever feared inside themselves and outside themselves are just more things to be loved.
So yes, it’s all and always, about the love.
silencetolight 