LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Ðoan Hoàng Curtis!

Let's just make a thing

Have you ever met someone and felt like you already know them? 

When I first met our special guest this week, the incredible filmmaker Ðoan Hoàng Curtis, I said to her: “You and I have been friends for a very long time.”

And what I love about her is that she didn’t think that was a weird thing to say at all! She was just like: “Yes, of course. I remember you!”

Listen, I don’t know how anything works. But it is true that sometimes I am flooded with intense familiarity when I meet a so-called stranger. This is how it was with me and Ðoan, from the beginning. I was certain that we had known each other a long, long time — beyond the realm of reason.

I often feel this way when I meet someone whom I connect with at the level of spirit. There is a sense that we are not so much meeting, as meeting AGAIN — that we are honoring an appointment to find each other once more in this lifetime, and to continue our work, or our love, or our creativity together.

Sometimes when I read your letters from Love — especially letters from newcomers, or first-timers — I am overcome with a feeling of joyful reunion. I am ecstatically happy to see not only that you are meeting up again with Unconditional Love, but that I am meeting up again with YOU!

At last! Once more! We are together again!

Just in time for our sacred appointment!

Have a beautiful week, my friends. Here we go!

Dear Love — What would you have me know today about my creative work in the world?

My urgent little fire ant, calm down.

First of all, very little of your creative work has anything to do with you, so right off the bat you can relax a bit. All of it comes from me through you, and really it’s just an open and long-standing invitation: Would you like to make this thing, or that thing, or both of those things, or none of those things? There will always be more things on offer for you to create with me, and you can dip in and out of that stream as much or as little as you like — you are just the cup that is doing the dipping. Or not, as the case may be.

The word I wish to convey to you today, believe it or not, is CASUAL.

Casual!

Be more casual about your creative work, my love. Bring as light an energy to it as you can. Don’t grip it in your white-knuckled hands — just skim across the surface of it like a dragonfly. We need less of your involvement in it than you could ever imagine. Take it less seriously and be less urgent. The world doesn’t need any more serious artists, but it does need more art, so keep going.

Trust in the abundance of inspiration and you can nibble off it forever, as though from a great and endless buffet.

To get more specific: Yes, this memoir about Rayya and about addiction that you are writing at the moment is just where we want you to be, and it is where I want your attention. But not ALL your attention! Even if you write for two hours a day, which is a very good day of work, that still leaves 22 other hours to do other things, like looking at birds and eating lunch and talking to your friends and putting clothes away in your closet — all of which, is also me. All of which is my flow.

I don’t want to say more, my little striver, because I don’t want you to get too much up in your head about your work — and there is a level at which I don’t even want you thinking or talking about it as work. It’s just a thing. It’s just a thing we do, and there will always be more things.

It’s always best when you take it lightly, my dear, and when you acknowledge that you don’t have any idea why or how you can do this work that we do together, and if it matters, or what will happen next — and that you don’t need to know. As with so many aspects of life, I ask you: Can you do without knowing? Can you do without understanding why or how you are doing this, or what anything means, or what will happen next? Can you simply DO, and leave the asking of questions and the searching for answers to others who wish to put their heads in hot tangles?

Let’s not do hot tangles, my love. Let’s just make a thing, babe. It’s that simple.

Have a soft day, I love you.

Prompt

Perhaps this week you would like to ask Unconditional Love what messages it has for you about your creative work in this world? Or perhaps not! Totally up to you! We don’t make any rules here! But you are always welcome to play along . . . and regardless, please enjoy this wise piece of graffiti from a corner in Brooklyn. This week,