Spring tidings, friends -
Blossoms are everywhere right now, so lovely and tender and ephemeral. Note to self to lavish attention on the weeping cherries, the creamy magnolias, the gaudy forsythia before the petals are drifting at my feet. One more day of wind and rain and they’ll be gone. Wish you were here so we could gawk at all this beauty together.
This is a bird newsletter now. Some observations:
-I saw an Eastern bluebird and almost correctly identified it in the moment. How exciting to know a new bird! Joy - it’s in the littlest things.
-It’s always a thrill to spot a dude cardinal streaking through the yard, but have you ever looked closely at his partner? Tomato red beak, tawny chest, blushing tail - that lady cardinal, she’s a subtle babe. Some might even say more of a babe, though less striking at first glance, than her male counterpart.
-I read that mourning doves are seasonally monogamous. Yeah they coo, mate, get those babies out of the nest, and move on. They might mate again, might not. I like how the animal world gives us more models for partnership than we give ourselves.
Just kidding, this is still a glorified journal entry newsletter, someone please save me from my navel gazing. While we wait,
I’ve spent the past few months with love on the brain, because I’m very tired of the dominant narrative about love in our culture and I want to hear, share, and experience new stories. The dominant narrative for women remains: seek love (preferably from a man, often before you truly love yourself), lock in a partner, make babies, stay monogamous and committed for life.
So linear! So limiting! And also - as author Darcey Steinke points out in her book, Flash Count Diary - this story hands over a married woman’s plot line to the man and children in a woman’s life.
Not only does the linear plot depend on other people to propel it forward, but this narrative marginalizes the many ways we can truly love each other - whether the love is queer, or like mourning doves but with less sitting around on a nest, or serial, or non-monogamous, or platonic but still romantic. It narrows love’s aperture and gives it the single story treatment.
And in that single story treatment, this model of loving also asks so much of us as partners. We’re asked to provide each other with all of the intimacies that a human needs - as Esther Perel, bell hooks, and many others have pointed out. It’s a lot, regardless of how well a pair of people are able to give and receive intimacies of all kinds.
I want to broaden love’s aperture, to share more intimacies with more people and knock that dominant narrative off its perch - making all of the ways we stay loving, intimate, and committed to each other as important as the primary partnership in our lives. I want partners in wonder; in mountain hiking and cloud, star, and meadow gazing. Partners in all things art and music and literature. Some partners in aging well. Some partners in the madness that is modern parenting. Many partners in being ridiculous. Some for the long term, some for a time.
Because I have a feeling if we open ourselves to each other with more frequency, more depth, more vulnerability, we’ll get closer to a kind of love that is bigger than any of us.
Over the past few days, I’ve fallen in love with a dead man I’ve never met. Jim Ford was a singer-songwriter originally from Harlan County, Kentucky, though he left home as a young teenager and did most of his music-making in LA after a stint in New Orleans. I have no words other than holy fuck, the man was very good at what he did. Hoo boy.
My favorite song of his has two versions - She Turns My Radio On and He Turns My Radio On. They’re both about the feeling you get when someone else meets your frequency - all day music, all night song. In one tune, it’s a woman. In the other, it’s Ford’s god.
Ford makes it plain: when it’s good and right, love creates the conditions for self-transformation, brings us closer to ourselves, and closer to the divine, whatever that means to you. Darcey Steinke echoes the sentiment in Flash Count Diary, writing, “A lover, consummated or not, can be a divine escort leading you to the beloved, the infinite, God.”
Metaphysical love, baby. Finding it so hot right now.
But really, maybe the more we love each other in depth, without worrying that we’re not doing it right because we’re not following some outdated script for what we’re supposed to do, the more we can be in communion with the infinite, which we can then reflect back to our world. We need this! Our world needs it.
When you love, you see your beloved in the waxing gibbous moon and its aura, in the dimming sunlight making the skyscrapers glow, in the fuzzy moss blanketing a rock - everywhere your spirit catches signs of beauty. Or, is it that loving sharpens your ability to understand how this feeling can truly be universal and include both humans and nonhumans, earthbound and otherwise, in its embrace? In other words, love, please make me one with everything. I want more!
And I’d venture a guess that if we can hitch a ride with love into the infinite, we can transform ourselves (and our world, too?), and we can begin to love without the need to possess, without the fear that often accompanies the act of loving others. As W.H. Auden wrote in his poem, The More Loving One,
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Isn’t that experience of love something we should allow to unfold in any way it wishes, rather than in a story sold to us by a patriarchal society?
If I can’t convince you, maybe Jim can.
XO,
Leigh