You'll Be Given Love

Maybe not from the directions you are staring at

Björk sings:

You'll be given love
You'll be taken care of
You'll be given love
You have to trust it

Maybe not from the sources
You have poured yours
Maybe not from the directions
You are staring at

Twist your head around
It's all around you
All is full of love
All around you

---

January 5th, 4.30am I am driving down from Topanga Canyon, hitting the PCH, “Drops of Jupiter” playing while streaks of pink stretches across the California sky with the promise of yet another day, yet another sun rise.

24 hours later everything is on fire.

California and her angels had me immediately wrapped in something that felt an awful lot like home. I spent 1,5 months steeped in humans and hearts that opened before me in ways that had me moved daily. Eagle Rock breathed life and prayers into me; friends cooked for me and helped me through a passing THC crisis. I know guilt is of no help, but when I woke up safe and sound in Costa Rica while the canyon I had just stayed in was on fire I was heartbroken, guilty and hopeless to be of such little help for the people and the nature that had held me.

“The Wild Edge of Sorrow” speaks of the collective grief that lives within our bones. How we simply must break for the loss of nature, of wild life, of safety for our peers, but how we also must take the extracted nectar of this grief, one could call it Love, and move with it and it into the world. We must take care of each other with what we got.

Acts of care are really quite simple, but unusually powerful when we have the courage to let Love seep in. My time living together with 3 close friends in Costa Rica for the last month has been a great study and experience of Love.

I believe anyone who leaves a longterm partnership in their 30's, at one point has had to revisit and question ideas around belonging, family and care. And to face the fear of the much anticipated echoing hole that could be arising when you cut ties with your primary person of care. Much to my surprise I have never felt more loved or cared for, than when I started to let not just one person care for me but instead let in a village of people. My people. The hole turned out to be a space that asked for my participation in making a choice. What and who feels good to be around?

It has been confronting and challenging at times to grow soft around the edges of my skin; it is also the only way I have found to truly let love in.

I have willingly, but not fearlessly, let people enter the inside of my heart lining. I am practicing turning to directions where love is looking for me too.

I seek intimacy with everything in life and it continues to be the thing that also scares me the most. The thing with intimacy is, it has no end. There is no bottom to the well of emotional and spiritual intimacy. As much as I have yearned for it, as much it continues to shake my ground, just a little, when I let myself sink in deeper.

Something ungrip in me every time I learn that I don’t have to fight it or fight for it. When I don’t have to fight, I am disarmed. When I am disarmed, I am permeable. When I am permeable life can move me to the point of breaking. I have learned that a heart breaking is also a heart breaking open.

The last month I've been moved to tears daily by the small acts of kindness and care produced by our little commune. In the seemingly mundanity of life I have found a healing balm to my scar tissues that still thinks love has to be complicated to be real. Connective tissue is growing together stronger in the realisation that love is simple, not always easy, but simple. If we chose it to be. From coffee already brewed in the morning to brownies shared across the table and my favorite dish cooked when I was too nervous to eat anything else. From taking turns in holding each other, witnessing each other, stroking each others hair and being seen in vulnerable, intimate and tender ways. From an equal shared excitement and celebration of doing the hard thing, to letting each other be exactly in the mood one might find themselves in without needing to change or fix a thing. To just be there. A presence permeating through every particle of space, of such potency and simplicity that fills ones entire body with a belonging not based on sameness, but acceptance and understanding. Something that leaves spaciousness to breathe. It is Love.

I feel a depth of love that is hard to describe and perhaps a quiet liberation of what we've been taught to believe love is: Romantic love, tied to one person only. When in fact, as my body wells with Love, it is clear that love is an ocean shared between bodies, nature, animals, matter and ether. Waves crashing and colliding. Love is never further away than our willingness to stay open, to let it in.

Behind the veil of fear:

I am, all is, in fact full of love.

As I sit here, last woman to leave our house, writing this letter in my robe I feel like a mom who's children have just left the nest. There is the gentle, tender breaking of goodbyes. Grief, stretching the shores of my heart and I hear the echoes of footsteps and voices in an empty room, but right behind that – I dare to reach out my hand and right there, there is a presence, a vastness, so rich, so thick, so all-consuming. And in the crumble of what has been and the hollow sound of what will be, I can hear Love breathing.