Somehow: Thoughts on Love

…nobody in isolation becomes who they were designed to be.

I don’t know” is a portal.

Life is such a mystery that you have to wonder if God drinks a little.

Sometimes it all just sucks, as Jesus says somewhere in the Gospels (although off the top of my head I can’t recall chapter and verse.

When I first got sober, a man told me that upon waking every morning, instead of reciting the standard flowery recovery prayer, he said, “Whatever,“ and at night when he turned off his lights to go to sleep, he said, “Oh, well.“ In between he practised simplicity – he stayed sober, worked on acceptance, try to be of service to others, went for nature walks, picked up litter, made himself tea, and called it a day.

I think Jesus would agree that some people were incredibly annoying. Many days he had to lay down with a cold compress on his head.

I wanted to give up the fear that you fell in love with the car of me at the showroom only to find out that the breaks were worn and a spring was coming through the upholstery. That I tricked you into wanting me, but now you were stuck.

Community is a body of people crying for one another, working together for a common cause, enjoying and overlooking (or grimly, tolerating) each other’s foibles; it’s a rough and beautiful quilt sewn of patches that don’t seem to go together at all, and then do. Community means we’re collaborating. It means that you help my children and my old people and I help yours. It means we are in this together. Most of us are perhaps a tiny bit self-absorbed, and good at keeping out people who don’t look, vote, or act like our friends, and that’s very nice. But a good community includes all those other people and those of us at the edges. Welcomes are offered: hey, come on into the circle — yeah, you. You with your nose in the air, or a neck tattoo, a walker or a Rolls.

People like to say that time heals all wounds, and I think that is very nice but not entirely true: time does heal most things to some extent, and love gently tends the parts that still hurt.

When life has lost its promise, or disappointed us one too many times, when it is hard to trust again or feel alive and curious again, love beckons us over and asks, “Got a minute?

As my friend Barbara wrote, "We are Easter people living in a Good Friday world. It gets colder and darker, then the morning comes.

The mementos that collected in that attic for my ten years there were squares along the Chutes and Ladders path that led me to now.