Weekend Edition: Loving Better

We end this week sheltering at home, keeping to ourselves as much as possible to try to flatten the curve. This strange time will surely teach us more, but it has already helped us see how interdependent we are, and how crucial it is for us to think beyond our own wants and needs. We will get through this. But love for others must be an essential part of that journey.

I think about Emily Dickinson, who knew much about the kind of lives we are leading now. She, too, was caught in a devastating time when life was altered in every way: she was 31 when the Civil War began. And although she chose her seclusion, her solitary life is perhaps mirrored in the way we must live for now. She stayed apart, but she never lost her heart for humanity. At a particularly sorrowful time in her life, when the beloved son of the Amherst College president was killed in battle a year into the War Between the States, she wrote to her favorite cousins, “Let us love better, children, it’s most that’s left to do.” 

No doubt we are all learning to love better these days. Here is a poem that speaks to that theme. Thank you to Raya for sharing it with me.

Stock up on poetry not toilet paper,
Grace rather than guns.
Gorge on love,
Which multiplies like loaves and fishes.
Call people and talk for hours,
Fill their hearts with hope.
Hoard every sweet moment of your life
And then release each one into the world
To seed more joy.
Be stingy with nothing, 
Least of all yourself. 
Ensure the shelves of your heart never fall bare,
That your soul seeds new sprouts
And the wings of your imagination
Refuse containment.
May you realize what matters, who matters,
The rock that you can be,
When the world is shaking.
Stockpile only what is limitless, 
And can be shared with all.
    ~Mary Reynolds Thompson

Sounds like love to me.  So do these gifts of music for hard times by YoYo Ma and John Legend. Take heart. Feel the love. Stay healthy.


   

Until tomorrow, love to you from Nancie/Mom/Mimi/Grandma

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