LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Shannon Watts!

Rest well, lovelies

Hello Family! Thank you for your letters this week — and thank you especially for the deep kindness, support, and affection that you are showing to one another in the comments. This is incredibly vulnerable work. It is no small thing to open our hearts to each other publicly like this, and I am touched every week by how you have made this such a safe space for each other, in which to attempt to hear the voice of Love, speaking to you in your own voice. 

Speaking of voices, a member of our community named Cristy De La Cruz (hi Cristy!) mentioned this week in the comments that she has started recording her love letters to herself. “Hearing them in my own voice back to me has been healing medicine,” she writes. “I’ve gone back to them and replayed them to myself when I forget to feel that love toward myself.” 

Yes, Cristy! Thank you for bringing this up! And I do the same thing! I’ve got years and years of my own Letters from Love recorded and stored on the voice message app of my phone. What I’ve ended up with over the years is a personalized treasury of thousands of messages of love and tenderness, which I can reach for whenever I’m having a stressful or frightened moment. Nothing will get you through a scary doctor’s appointment or a boring wait in a long line better than listening to the voice of love, speaking directly to your heart.

Here’s my video message for the week, and I love you all!

Dear Love — What would you have me know today?

My little fern frond, my breathless striver, my diligent aspirational one. Carve out some time from your exhausting schedule of trying to do everything right, and come and sit with me for a moment.

Remember that I have no interest in your productivity or success — that I don’t need anything from you, and that you cannot earn me with good behavior. No, really, my love, you can’t. You can’t earn me, because you already have me.

Come and sit with me in the silent wonder of a field of being where we are not concerned with the question of excellence or productivity or even goodness. Has anything made you as tired in your life as trying so hard to be good? Little darling honey one — do you think there are enforcers with baseball bats hiding around every corner of the universe to punish you for the slightest misstep or slip? Well, there are, but they live within your frightened imagination, and they are imaginary.

My darling, my little acorn, please do not wait until you have left this body to experience what it feels like to be loved for no reason at all. Come and sit with us now, in the silence of this moment, and allow us to permeate your anxious imagination with the one truth that will release you from the need to keep trying so hard. Angel girl, we simply love you. And if you were to ask us why, we would be forced to admit that it is because we cannot help ourselves. And also because we made you. We made you, so that we would have something to love. That is all that this is. That is all that you are, and that is all that you see. Rest in this knowing, and stop your trembling attempts to do it all, and to do it all right. 

We are here. We love you. That is all there is. Close this book now and be quiet with us. All is well.

This week’s prompt

I’d like to build on Cristy’s comment — and my own experience — to suggest that after you become comfortable writing yourselves letters, you take the next step and see if you might record one or two. These recordings are just for you (for future you) and will always be there to remind you of a loving voice when you feel removed from it, or scared, or lonely, or unmoored. I find this to be an invaluable practice, a kind of FDIC-backed guarantee of self-soothing and self-compassion. And just in case you don’t believe me, here’s a random sampling of a week’s worth of recordings from last year. I can dip in and out of these recordings whenever I’m feeling low, and Love is always waiting for me.