My reaction — always — to violence, is to love even more. Love my children and my friends and my sisters and my nieces and nephews and my brothers-in-law and my one biological brother and my many chosen-brothers and my sisters-in-law and on and on and.
Love my two cats and the two neighbor cats who regularly come to my back door. (That would be you, Oliver and Kitty-Boy, in case you're reading.) Love the buttercups that I rip out of my garden, for their unrelenting tenacity. Love the peeling paint on my falling-down garage, love my falling-down garage which shall not be a studio, in my lifetime. Love the alley behind the garage. Love the Himalayan blackberry vines in the alley. Love the secret places in the alley and the secret places to which the alley leads, if you are observant.
Love my neighbors.
Love the rain.
Love that I have a job and love my job and love the one person who, every day, makes my job a miserable challenge. Yes. Love that person too.
Love broken glass and torn skirts and the April clouds that make me think of ripped silk. Love hail. Love the apple blossom petals that fly with the hail in the big wind that I love.
Love my toothbrush, my lavender soap, the sofa the cats claw. Love the stuffing bursting from the cushion of the sofa the cats claw. Love the cats' claws, especially when the cats are asleep and I can gently make the claws protrude.
Love snoring.
Love my beautiful, flawed, hurting, astonishing sons.
Love the father-in-law who is no longer my father-in-law, and also love the father of my dead husband. Love my dead husband, who died drunk and broken and alone on a frozen November night. Love the man who divorced me — even he, who is the most difficult to love.
Love the customers who came to my bakery and bowed down to the altar of sugar and butter.
Love making pie. Love the sound forks and plates make when eating pie, when the silence that my sons and I call Pie Silence occurs when eating really good pie.
Love Chopin's nocturnes. Chopin's ballades, especially the one I've been trying to master for 40 years. Love my piano with all chipped keys. Love its dissonance.
Love this inescapable imperfection which runs rampant across this magnificent planet. Love this planet.
All of you.
Love.
Oh, T. Love. Love. What stronger, more resilient glue than love.
ReplyDeleteYou remind us of this and in reminding us bring us all closer.
Thank you. xo
thank you. you made up my mind for me. today i will make pie. in the ashes, we have to do what it is we do best.
ReplyDeletebeautiful writing, T.
Susan, pie heals nearly everything.
Deletexo
...and Love returned T.
ReplyDeleteJacqueline.
Deletexo
Reminds me of the story T...a woman goes to her Rabbi and says "I don't know what to do about my son, he's lost, he doesn't go to temple any more, he gambles, he drinks, he hates life Rabbi, he is so difficult. What should I do Rabbi?" and the Rabbi replies "Love him more".
DeleteJacqueline, thank you for sharing this story. I've thought of it several times already this week, and just remembering your words here makes the practice of it that much more do-able. In fact, I avoided a potentially volatile confrontation with someone because of your comment.
DeleteAll best,
T.
Thank you, T.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad for our connection, Joannie.
Deletexo
Love the ebb and flow of your words.
ReplyDeleteLLX
lettice leaf, thank you.
DeletexT.
The only person you can't love in all this, is the little b*stard who pressed the button on the bombs. Occasionally I have to agree with capital punishment.
ReplyDeleteCro, I'll never be on the side of capital punishment.
DeleteI remember after 9/11, the Dali Lama spoke of Love. Even loving the terrorists. Hardest of all.
ReplyDeleteBut for our own sake, and for the sake everyone around us, love has got to be the response. Beautifully written, T. Inspiring.
Tara, despite the cliche, it's true that "all you need is love".
DeleteThank you, friend.
oxT.
that's the best reaction. sp
ReplyDeleteSusanna, sending my best to you down in NOLA.
DeletexT.
Wow T --
ReplyDeleteI love this,
love you,
Peter
Peter, it's good to see you here.
DeletexT.
Oh, love. I love this. I haven't read anything clearer or more exact.
ReplyDeleteElizabeth, seems so elementary, doesn't it? And yet it's a struggle every day.
Deletexo
Thank you, T. Very touching; very true; very necessary; indispensable, really.
ReplyDeleteAnd very T.
Eva, I glad this resonated with you, and I'm always delighted to see you've come by. When are you going to visit M. again?!
DeletexoT.
Thank you, T. Very touching; very true; very necessary; indispensable, really.
ReplyDeleteAnd very T.
I too love this post and your message. I put a link in my little post because you said it all so well. xo
ReplyDeleteMel, you honor me, truly. This community of ours is an extraordinary one, and that we can connect in this way only shows that there are still possibilities for us flawed humans.
DeletexoT.
And I love this:
ReplyDelete... the April clouds that make me think of ripped silk.
Love, C.
C.,
DeleteI can only imagine how this bombing triggered your 9/11 days.
Be well, friend.
xoT.
this is beautiful. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Angella.
DeletexT.
Balm to the heart, balm to the soul.
ReplyDeleteThank you and love to you.
xoxo
Cynthia, I'm standing out on my deck and waving to the east — can you see me?!
Deletexoxoxo
The universal antidote, which you expressed so beautifully, the wide paths, the narrow crawl spaces, the crusty patches where we fear the scabs may be too thick. I am so glad I stopped here on my way to write. I may do that or I may just be and love the ache in my knee and the taste of chocolate on my tongue. The world needs to read this, T. xo
ReplyDeleteDear Marylinn, thank you for the gift of this comment, for these words.
DeletexoxoT.
As I sit here waiting for a baby to be born (I'm a midwife), what I think of is that those brothers have a mother.She washed and fed them, fussed over them and loved them. Everyone has a mother. Everyone was once a tender infant. Any broken person was once new born. Some of us go out and do terrible things, to others and to ourselves. Some win Nobel prizes.
ReplyDeleteWe can harden to the world. Or we can allow our hearts to break. Every day we have a choice.
Thank you.
I, too, want to thank you, T. Of all the possible reactions, yours is best. A huge struggle, but the only goal worth reaching for. And the way you wrote it makes me feel it is both absurdly difficult and entirely possible at the same time, to love those things and people most difficult to love. Gracias.
ReplyDeleteOh lord, what Beth wrote. xo
ReplyDelete