LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Behida Dolić!

Stand in it

Dear Lovelets,

Years ago when I was traveling in India with my friend Richard from Texas and having a difficult time with my life, I said something to him like, “How can I be so brokenhearted about my own struggles, when I see people all around me who are in so much poverty and lack?”

Richard told me something very wise in that moment: “Don’t ever try to make yourself feel better by comparing yourself to people who have it worse that you. That’s a pretty cheap emotional trick. Don’t use people that way, kiddo. You can do better than that.”

He was right — it is a cheap trick!

This is why even children intuitively know that it’s emotionally manipulative garbage when their parents try to guilt-trip gratitude into them by pointing out how much better off they are than other kids: “Look how more you have than others! Some children have no food! Some children have no homes! Look how much luckier you are!”

I don’t believe that focusing upon the suffering of others, as a means of generating gratitude for yourself, ever actually made anybody feel better. I think it just makes us (even children) feel kind of sickened and disturbed. Not to mention saddened and overwhelmed by how much suffering exists out there.

So how do we find real gratitude — for the things in our lives that are sincerely beautiful? Not cheap-trick gratitude for all the nice stuff we’ve got that other people haven’t got — but deep, silencing, awe-invoking gratitude for the sacredness of things we have been given. The things that are so beautiful, so miraculous, so mysterious that we can’t even understand where they came from or why they are ours.

This week our guest is my beloved friend the artist, dancer, milliner, clothing designer, mother, adventurer, self-made woman, survivor, and rising phoenix who is Behida Dolić. Behida’s story is not mine to tell, but I will say she has experienced more tragedy and loss in her life than anyone I have ever known. And yet she remains luminescent, ascendant, and always creative. And yet her letter from Love this week is the most sweeping expression of gratitude — true, holy, humble gratitude — that I have ever read. Gratitude for what is beautiful. Gratitude for what is, incredibly, hers, including her most miraculous of angel babies.

“Stand in it,” Love gently directs her. “Stay a little while.”

What is beautiful in your life today, my dear friends? Not in comparison to anyone else’s life. Not the stuff you’re supposed to say, when people ask you what you are grateful for. What is REALLY beautiful? Deeply and profoundly so? What has Unconditional Love given you, that you cannot believe you get to have?

Let’s find it.

Or, rather, let’s listen to what Love has to say about it.

All my love,

Your Lizzy

Dear Love, what is beautiful about my life today?

Oh little handful of gems, you make me chuckle. I am not teasing you, but sweetheart? Sweetheart! Honestly!

Let’s skip the simple list of gratitudes, which you try to do every day anyway, and which is a nice practice — no, really, it’s a nice practice, although sometimes I fear it feels a little bit like work for you! — and let’s go deeper.

What is beautiful about your life today? More than anything, little treasure chest, it is how deeply in love you have fallen with God. Don’t worry, precious, go ahead and use the word. It won’t scare people. And if it does scare people, just remind them that whatever God they don’t believe in, you also don’t believe in that God, so you’re cool with it.

But you know what I mean when I say God. You know what I mean, and what I don’t mean.

Not a set of rules. Not a threat. Not something that you need to please, or keep happy. Just a never-ending presence of warm, immense, and mutual devotion.

And you know what I mean when I say “in love with” as well.

For you, being in love with God doesn’t mean being afraid of God. It doesn’t mean being obedient to God, either (although I think you would agree that the word “alignment” works nicely for you both, right?). It doesn’t mean that you are trying to be God — or even to be “one with God” which is an ambition I told you to give up several years ago, because what’s so bad about duality, anyhow, and who wants to work that hard?

Being in love with God, for you, doesn’t mean that you understand how the universe works, or that you have a coherent answer for why bad things happen to good people, because you don’t.

It just means, for you, that you finally have a forever home. You finally have a never-blinking gaze to stare back into, and to get found in. And all you have to do in order to return to that home again and again is shut your eyes, quiet your breath, and say to that thing, that being, that voice you can only call God, “I love you.” And then you hear that thing say back, “I’m right here, sweetheart, and I love you, too.”

As you heard it put once, true divinity is relaxing completely in the company of somebody that you know is incredibly fond of you. How do you know this? How do you know that this somebody is so fond of you? The same way Pepita knows that you are her person, even though it took her four or five years to find you. Because she KNOWS. You didn’t have to explain it to her. You didn’t have to convince her of it. You just picked her up at the rescue center, unzipped your blue jumpsuit, tucked her into your shirt and against your chest — skin to fur — and that was it. Both of you knew. You were her person, and she was your dog.

This is the most beautiful thing about your life right now, little angel. This, this, this. This knowing. It’s the ocean that rolls and heaves beneath the ground that is beneath your feet, and it is the universe hidden in every breath. It is the greatest love story of your life — of all your lives.

And we, child, have watched you find it — one day at a time, for so many decades — and we are here for it.

You never have to lose it.

You can’t. It is yours.

And you are ours.

Prompt

This week, a rarity: I’d love for us all to try following the same prompt, since I fully believe that we all can, that even in our lowest moments or months or years of life, there is something beautiful that we can point to, which is always available to us. Sometimes that beautiful thing is private, sometimes it’s a grand shared thing like an ocean, sometimes it’s our own personal evolution. I want to learn where the beauty in your life is to be found, and whether it is a person, place, or thing: material like a garden, intangible like a relationship . . . so this week, let’s ask: Dear Love, what is beautiful about my life today?