LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Suleika Jaouad!

And so it begins...

Hello Beloved Family!

I’m so happy you’re here with us, ready to go on a journey into love, compassion, and the radical power of self-friendliness.

Here’s a video, telling you all about it!

Starting next week, dear ones, I will begin sharing my own Love Letters with you, and giving you guidance on how to write your own. (Although you are very free to start right now, if you feel inspired!) Here is the Letter From Love you heard in my video —

I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long. I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it — I will love you through that as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you too. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you.

I am stronger than depression and I am braver than loneliness, and nothing will ever exhaust me.

There will be times in the course of our journey when I will send you special guest Love Letters, written by friends of mine, or people I meet in my travels. I am so touched that our very first special guest is my beloved and brilliant friend, the memoirist and journalist

Suleika Jaouad

, author of the New York Times bestselling book BETWEEN TWO KINGDOMS. (Please read this book, if you haven’t had the chance! It’s pure magic, pure heart.) I invited Suleika to write a Love Letter to herself, to show us how it is done. I suggested that she ask Universal Love this one question: “Dear Love — What would you have me know today?”

Here is her beautiful letter, downloaded from Love itself:

Hello My Beloved Little Warrior,

You are in a season of extremes, of holding the brutally hard aspects of life and the astonishingly beautiful in one palm.

Sometimes, like today, the holding of both can feel heavy and hard. I want you to know that you have permission to rest your palm somewhere quiet and soft, as often as you need to. You are surrounded by beloveds, and you can also rest your palm against their palm and share the weight of it together.

Your body has been through so much. And yesterday’s donor lymphocyte infusion is coursing through your veins at this very moment, and finding its way into your marrow to keep the leukemia at bay — to keep your body strong and healthy. You can’t see your donor cells, or bake them a welcome pie, but you can embolden them with love and kindness and tender care. The more love you extend yourself, the more you rest, the more healing will occur.

Beholding your finitude is helpful. Always rerouting your priorities to what really matters. But time is not a race. To cherish this beautiful life of yours does not mean working and living like you’re running out of time. To cherish this beautiful life of yours is to move slow, to sit in the sun and behold the world around you right now. To sit present, to hold it all with wonder and tenderness and curiosity.

Keep going. Keep on doing the good work, my little warrior, even, maybe especially, when the good work is that of rest.

I love you.

I will also be sharing drawings and excerpts from my journals with you.

Like this!

Lastly, I will sometimes share my poems with you, if you would like to read them!

LEARNING HOW TO FEEL

Here there is a pressure.
Everywhere there is a pressure.
Ease it.
With touch, with song, with a voice across the night. 
Here there is a promise that I have made to myself:
I will see you at last; 
I will reclaim you from the past.
For too long I kept my grief lodged in a thimble-size prison in the upper right ventricle of my heart. 
Too small, too tight.
I can touch it with the edge of my thumb. 
But I will not die anymore for this lie of lack.
If my pain needs to fill the whole room, I will let it out.
Fill the whole town, I say — fill the whole world.
And then: release the hounds of love.
Come for me, hounds, come for me.
The truth will set us free. 

OK, my loves . . . this is a lot to take in for Day One. Please rest in love this week, and I will see you next Sunday! I am so delighted to see how this community will unfold and evolve.

Stay tuned, and stay kind to your dear selves —

❤️LG

This inaugural LETTERS FROM LOVE is free for all to enjoy, to comment upon, and to interact with! As of next week, the ability to post comments, to share your own Letters From Love, and to engage with me and other members of the community will be for paid subscribers only. My videos and Love Letters and prompts will always be free. Click here to upgrade, if you wish: