LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Rainn Wilson!

Bring me your resistance

Dearest Lovelets —

As I’ve mentioned before, I carry around these stickers with me everywhere I go that say YOU ARE LOVED.

If I ever run into you on the street (and sometimes I DO run into you on the street! Hello Canadian Lovelets walking randomly through San Jose, Costa Rica, the other day!) I will hand you a sticker. I also give the stickers to kiddos and baristas and gas station attendants and flight attendants and really anybody who seems nice. But here’s the thing — I also give the stickers to people who DON’T seem nice.

This isn’t always easy.

When I encounter people who have faces like closed fists, who seem angry and tense, and miserable to be at their jobs, or who are snappy and cranky, I hear a voice within me say, “You know the rule.”

The rule is: the more I think somebody will not want a YOU ARE LOVED sticker, the more necessary it is that I give it to them.

I have to.

It’s the law.

Nobody has punched me yet.

In fact, what happens every time is the cranky, angry, grumpy, snappy, miserable-appearing person seems surprised, and then delighted, with this unasked-for gift. They aways smile. They almost always touch it to their hearts. They often say, “You have no idea how much I needed this today.”

There seems to be something about the words YOU ARE LOVED that pierces bitterness and cynicism.

It shouldn’t be that simple, but sometimes it is.

I bring this up because I delighted in the fact that our very special guest Rainn Wilson — actor, fellow Substacker (why aren’t you subscribed?), author of Soul Boom: Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution, and more — admitted this week in his video that his first reaction when I reached out to ask if he would join us was a sense of judgment. AND I GET THAT. I really do get it. I understand that this practice could seem saccharine and superficial at best, and, at worst, insulting (in light of the very serious problems that people are facing all over the world). What a dumb idea, to tell people who are in serious pain to just write themselves a letter from unconditional love, and maybe they will feel better! What utter poppycock! You might as well hand out YOU ARE LOVED stickers on the street and think you’re making a difference!

And yet.

And yet . . .

Something DOES happen, when we come to this practice.

Doesn’t it?

Something does change, something does help, some shell of cynicism falls away, and what is left is a voice that is both utterly pragmatic and deeply sincere, saying, indeed, YOU ARE LOVED.

It shouldn’t be so simple, and yet it is.

This week, dear hearts, let’s talk about the parts of us that still resist this idea that love is real, and that we are worthy of it. And then, as Rainn Wilson so beautifully directed in his letter, once he had pushed past his initial judgment of this practice: “bandage them in love.”

Indeed, indeed.

Onward with the love bandages!

Love,
Your Lizzy

Dear Love, what would you have me know about my resistance to you?

Oh honey. Honey, honey, honey. Little honey. Little One.

Resistance, suspicion, guardedness, doubt, cynicism, learned distrust, shut-down-ness, toxic self-reliance, reserve . . . why WOULDN’T these reactions swim about in your system?

What about life in Earth School HASN’T taught you that love is not to be trusted — that it flickers on and off like a lightbulb with faulty wiring? Haven’t you been taught empirically that you can only be loved if you are perfect — and even then, you might not get it? And if you get it, you might not keep it? And that someone can take their love away from you from one moment to the next, that their hearts can turn calloused toward you, that someone who once held you in the greatest tenderness can suddenly look upon you with hardened contempt?

Sweetheart, you have spent a pretty substantial part of your life trying to figure out what the secret code is to get people to love you, and to make them KEEP loving you. It’s like the barista at the café where you worked back in the mid-nineties — Hilario was his name — who had a bit of a drinking problem and wasn’t always focused, and when you would point to one of the coffee orders he had lined up on the counter and ask, “Is this one the decaf?” he would look intently into your eyes for the answer. (Did you WANT it be decaf? You could see him struggling to answer. What was the answer that would bring you satisfaction and not get him in trouble? And tentatively, nervously, slowly, he would nod and say, “Yesssss . . . that’s the decaf.”)

This is how you have looked into the eyes of your fellow students here in Earth School — otherwise known as “other people” (except, of course, they aren’t really “other”). You have searched their faces for the right answer — what did they need you to be, so that you could glean from them the love you needed to survive? And you got pretty good at it, honey. Very good at it. And still, the source wavered. No matter what you did, or who you became, the sources of love always wavered.

Sweetheart, I will keep it simple. The love that I have to offer you isn’t some sort of secret code. It’s not a treasure hunt. It’s not a competition. It’s not a scarcity contest. It’s not something that you can win or lose. It’s not OUT THERE to be found.

The love that I have to offer you is infinite, inward, self-replenishing, and utterly untied to your behavior or worthiness — and that alone is why you sometimes still resist the idea of my very existence: because there is a part of you, a very human part of you, who can still not imagine such a thing as a love that generates itself, or exists outside the realm of your correct or incorrect behavior, or does not ebb or flow in reaction to something or somebody. How can it just BE? How can I just BE? What creates me? What sustains me?

My child, I create and sustain myself. And that is why I can do what a human can never do: I can love you without ever faltering. I take no days off. I have no office hours or black-out travel dates. I have nowhere better to be than with you, and so that is where I stay.

Sweetheart. Wherever you are the most resistant to me is where I actually most strongly abide, where I most strongly love you. Doubt is a wound, and you have earned your doubts valiantly, by being utterly heartbroken a score of times in your life. But I am the antidote to every single one of your perceived losses. I am the balm, I am the un-earnable reward. And trusting in me — trusting in something you cannot see or prove or heaven knows CONTROL — is how healing happens.

So bring me your resistance. I embrace it. Bring me your doubts, cynicism, guardedness, distrust, and fear. Why would I not love those parts most of all — those trembling, frightened, wounded parts of you, who need love more than anything? Why would I not want to reach into your heart and take each one of those CONCEPTS by the hand, and lead them into the light. Adorable, stumbling, orphaned spirits — each one more deserving of love than the last.

Bring all your doubts and fears to me. I have a bed for each one of them, soft as the dawn. It is time to rest. Safety, my love, is here. And you don’t even have to believe it for it to be true.

Let’s keep going.

Prompt

This week’s theme is among our most elemental and weighty: resistance to love itself. Maybe you are one of the great numbers of us who wrestle with the idea of worthiness — or maybe your resistance was (is?) to this practice of tapping into a source of unconditional love. Let’s face it: it is vulnerable. It sounds woowoo.

Have you let down your guard? Is it still up?

This week, join me in posing this question: Dear Love, what would you have me know about my resistance to you?