Love Letter 20

We’ve never met; you’ve heard of me and I’ve heard of you, but even without the requisite personal contact, it turns out I love you. I’m not kidding, I’m crazy about you. I’m hoping now that Michael clued you in, so you know this isn’t a creepy love letter from some sort of secret or not so secret admirer who wants something from you.  It’s not about wanting something from you, it’s more about wanting to give something to you, (encouragement maybe? hope?) which it seems to me, is where love begins. (If only we could find a way to program that little insight into everyone’s neuroplastic brain, can you imagine what the world would be like?)  So nothing creepy, just a true expression of how my heart feels when I think about who you are and how you go into the world. Really, how could anyone keep from loving you, a woman whose compassion and courage run so deep that she has dedicated her life to eradicating pain . . . and I know that you know what pain is about. I’ve seen the self-portrait you drew that day  when you were trying one more thing that might or might not have worked to rid your own brain of a, what was it called, a headache? I’m certain we need a different word to describe it. Like the Eskimos and their collection of words for snow, we could use a more nuanced pain vocabulary. That pain that lived inside you for so long, stole too much of your life. That pain that drove you to the boundary between chaos and nothing, took away too much pleasure. An experience that shapes a life like that shouldn’t have the same name as what my grandson felt when he bumped his head on the coffee table last Saturday (though his anguished cry was real enough). We don’t have a large vocabulary for pain. I’d have to check but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that no language does and there’s a reason for that. We spend most of our time running from it. We see suffering, we turn tail and we run; doesn’t matter what direction, we just run. The world is in outrageous pain. We anesthetize our hearts in an effort to drown that pain out. Not you. “It’s watching the suffering that drives us,” you said, drives you to deconstruct the neuroplastic habits of pain we’ve learned so well. A friend of mine likes to say that the only response to outrageous pain is outrageous love. In the face of pain the world needs open hearts, like the one I see in the center of that self-portrait you drew, even in that moment of pain. The commandments in the Torah are all about love – generative, compassionate, healing love. The Rabbis tell us that the reason Torah entreats each of us to keep the commandments on our heart, is so that when our heart breaks they will fall inside, so the love will fall inside. You do that sweetheart, you let the love fall inside each time you suffering drives you to compassion, each time it opens a creative, healing response, each time you apply yourself to that cause, you do that. I know without knowing that you do not do it perfectly, but I know equally well without knowing that each time what is uniquely you is expressed in this world, beauty emerges. For it is at the boundary between chaos and nothing that beauty makes her appearance. You, sweet heart are a stunningly beautiful woman and I love you.

Sam