LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Darcey Steinke!
What good is love?
Dear Lovelets,
I want to share with you something that one of your fellow Lovelets wrote in the comments this week that touched my heart. This person goes by the name A Diary of Deep Feelings, and they had this to say about our growing community:
“I just began reading the comments on this beautiful post, there are hundreds of them, and as I moved from one to the another, I felt how many lives were quietly braided together here. Different ages, different seasons, priorities, ways of seeing the world. . . . And I thought: Maybe this is what it is. A movement. A community. I’ve never really belonged to one before. Where I come from, in Peru, people are warm and close by nature, and in the Amazon, life is simple, shared, human. This feels similar. We are all different here. I see only small icons, fragments of faces, but they make me smile. I don’t know your ages or your struggles, yet there is something comforting in feeling accompanied in the world.”
The writer goes on to say: “I love how freely emotions are shared here, without shame. I’m still mostly observing, not out of shyness, but out of listening. . . . Thank you for sharing.”
Dear hearts, my friend Margaret (for newcomers: Margaret is my dear friend from our college days, who is also the managing editor of this Substack) and I are constantly marveling over the tenderness and kindness that we see each week in the comments section. “Tenderness” and “kindness” are not words one typically associates with ANY comments section, but truly in over two years of doing this project, there has been no cruelty, no provocations, no hatred or shaming words shared in the comments. And that’s what makes this a safe place to share emotion freely — or, as the letter above shared — just to BE WITH US, even if you don’t want to share, for any reason. Your mere presence here, whether you are sharing your own letters from love or not, is a gift. Your care becomes part of the gentle ecosystem that makes this level of vulnerability possible — not only for each other, but for our guests each week, and certainly for me.
I am grateful to each and every one of you, for making this community possible — and for proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that love (even Unconditional Love) is real.
Our special guest this week is one of my oldest friends: the journalist, novelist, and essayist Darcey Steinke — whose new book, THIS IS THE DOOR: The Body, Pain, and Faith, will be out next week. Darcey is also one of the patron saints of EAT PRAY LOVE, as you will hear in my video.
Keep coming around here, Lovelets. We’ve got a good thing going!
Love,
Your Lizzy
If you’d like to write your own letter from love but don’t know how, let us hold your hand. And if you’d like to share your letter with us, just leave it in the comments section below. To do so, you must have a paid subscription to Letters From Love. We have found that this safeguards our kind, like-hearted community and the intimate work we do together.
Dear Love, what would you have me know about doubt?
When you don’t get what you want, little bean, you doubt.
And this is normal, perfectly normal — a worldwide condition, the most human of human nature.
Here’s how your doubt is generated, fed, and sustained: things do not go your way, either on a global or personal scale, and you lose faith: “How can love exist if it did not manifest for me exactly what I want? What good is love, if it allows for loss, unfairness, trauma, even atrocity? Love must not be real. Love must not be HERE, for I am unhappy, unsatisfied, alone and angry, disappointed and despairing, fearful and shut down.”
It is because you don’t understand us that you doubt us like this, sweetheart. It is because you think we, the Spirit of Unconditional Love, are one thing, when in fact we are something else. Something far, far bigger than what you could ever have imagined. To borrow and paraphrase what your friend Walt Whitman said about death, we could define ourselves this way: To love is different from what anyone supposed, and luckier.
You doubt love because you have linked it to desire. Not just sexual or romantic desire — although of course, you have always blended your ideas of love with sexual and romantic attachments, to the point that it becomes a murky mess that always leaves you disenchanted, abandoned, and furious. But that’s what desire does, honey — as your friend the Buddha knew better than anyone, which is why he named attachment as the root of all suffering.
But it’s not just sexual attachment or romantic desire that you blend and confuse with love; it’s all your attachments and desires. You want what you want, and when you don’t get it (whatever “it” is) you lose faith. You lose your ground of being, and you feel that life is nothing, nothing, nothing but a field of sorrows, a terrible yawning void.
That’s actually a good place to look for the Spirit of Unconditional Love, dear heart. In that endless field of sorrows. In that terrible yawning void. That is, in fact, where we always abide. That is where you first heard our voice.
You were sold — all of you were sold — a story of love that was all about getting your needs and wants met, but listen. You’re all adults here, so let’s get deeply, bravely truthful. Who, amongst the whole lot of you in Earth School, ever got all your needs and wants met? Show me one! And no, please don’t point out your billionaires, your moguls, your tyrants or I will ask you to look closer. Look close enough to see their misery, their thwarted ambitions, their terrible hungry despair, their depression, their angry, angry, angry desire that never ends.
Nobody, my child. Nobody in Earth School gets all their needs and wants met — although it sure looks to us like you have all misunderstood the assignment, and have made it your ferocious, blazing aim, each one of you, to see that you do get everything you want, at all times.
You can’t. You can’t, sweetheart. You can’t. And it is in the broken-heartedness of that reality that your spiritual immaturity will shatter and make room for wisdom. And that wisdom, that earned wisdom, is where you will find us. Patiently awaiting your attention.
That wisdom, dear, is what you came to Earth School for. That wisdom is the reward. That beautiful, burnished, soft-edged wisdom — born in surrender and humble acceptance over what cannot be had, held, or controlled. That’s the gold you can earn, once you drop all the ideas you are clinging to which seem so appealing but do nothing but cut at your skin.
At times you have been so angry about your own thwarted wants and desires that you have yelled at us on the page, in these letters, over the decades: “Where are you? What’s going to happen next? Why is everything so wrong? Why don’t you save me?”
And once you yelled at me, “If you can’t give me what I want, or tell me what’s going to happen, or tell me what to do to stay safe, what good are you?”
To which I responded, “I am comfort for you in your darkest hour, so you don’t have to be alone.”
You scoffed: “What good is THAT? What good is comfort in the darkest hour? Just make the darkness go away!”
What good is comfort, in your darkest hour?
Really, honey?
Really?
You cannot see the importance of having a presence with you in your lowest moments, so you don’t have to be alone, no matter what you are going through?
You had a friend some years ago who suffered a terrible loss. An obscene and horrific loss, one of the worst things you have ever seen happen to anyone. Her loss was so appalling you didn’t even want to call her, because the idea of a phone ringing in her house at that moment seemed offensive. And what would you say, “I’m sorry”? “How are you feeling?” Those weak, ineffectual words? But a week after her loss, instead of piercing the silence of her suffering with a phone call, you sent her a letter. You wrote, “I want to tell you something. I discovered when Rayya was sick and dying that I have a rare talent for sitting absolutely silent in a room where somebody is suffering. I can sit for hours on end, without needing to move or speak. If you would just like someone to just come to your house a few hours a day to sit in silence, so you don’t have to be alone with what you are going through, and you don’t have to talk, just let me know.”
She reached out immediately after receiving your letter, and said “Yes, please.”
So that is what you did. You just went and sat in her home with her in silence, for hours at a time — no need to move or speak. No need to fix what could not be fixed. Just in the room.
Do you think that was meaningless? Unhelpful?
She didn’t. And after a few visits like that, slowly, in her own thawing time, she began to speak. To open up. To grieve with you.
This is what we are, my love. We are that love that sits in the room silently, when nothing else will help. We reach through the dark places where no other light can reach. We are the ground of being when the ground has been ripped out from under you. We are the one certain thing when all faith has been lost.
We are not a wish-fulfilling magical stone that you can beg to, pray to, to have your wants, needs, and desires met. We are bigger than that. We are more important than that. We are the thing that knows that after every want, need, and desire has been lost or thwarted, something is still here. We are that something — silent, and waiting. We are that presence. We are the one thing you need never doubt, because we, the Spirit of Unconditional Love, are not going anywhere.
That’s what we are.
That is all.
Let’s keep going.
Prompt
This week, another subject that feels both evergreen and commonly shared: doubt. Why do so many of us find ourselves compelled to doubt not just the presence of unconditional love, but also our own instincts, faith, abilities . . . why is doubt, the flip side of trust, so much easier to embrace? Let’s find out. This week, join me in getting still, quieting your mind, and posing this question: Dear Love, what would you have me know about doubt?