Love Transcends Time
90’s candles, Liege & Leaf, and rainbow bookshelves
My cousin sent me an Instagram meme the other day captioned “I’m this old.” It was a photo of those stained-glass swirly candles they used to sell at head shops: round like Christmas ornaments and covered in tiny intricate spiral-patterns, they’d light up from within and slowly melt at the edges. We both had them in the mid-90s, and seeing this candle still touches some tender spot in me. I remember the pictures we took of each other in my bedroom, 15 years old and trying to be cool, our sunglasses tipped down low on the bridge of the nose, our mouths a casual pout of nonchalance, our thrift-store tee-shirts slouched off the shoulder in some attempt at juvenile sexiness.
Some 30 years have passed, but I’m loving us anew in that moment. In a way that feels simple and nourishing this morning, like a fresh breeze through the window.
The window is open as I write, so I’m feeling that breeze, that nourishment of just being with what is. I’m playing the album Liege and Leaf by Fairport Convention, which I discovered at a record shop in Tulsa, Oklahoma in August of 2007 when my husband and I were there helping my parents sort and pack up my grandmother’s house after her death. He and I had just returned from a year of backpacking and were still untethered.
We found ourselves in Tulsa for weeks, looking through records and paintings and clothes and kitchenware and determining what to divide among family, what to donate. Every day was sensory overload and grief too big to bear.
The dark green tiles in her bathroom I knew I’d never see again. The burlap-textured 60’s wallpaper with animals on it that I’d lie next to as a little kid and run my fingertips over. The sliding glass door out of her high-ceilinged art studio onto a landing paved in riverstones, one of which was sharp enough that I sliced the top of my second toe open on it as a child. You can still faintly make out the scar. The Velveeta-yellow blanket she’d tuck into the pull-out couch, once I outgrew the animal-wallpapered room because my little sister was in it, a blanket with one of those silky edges, the kind you could rub against your cheek.
We sorted it all: books and art supplies and boxes of photos. We took a stack of records to sell to a local shop and then we needed to buy something with the store credit, and the sales guy found this album and placed it in my hands and it became a reminder of this time. So that the beauty of Fairport Convention still recalls that August, 18 years ago: the treehouse in Guatemala near Lago de Atitlan where we’d been staying just before flying to Tulsa; the roadtrip across the Southwest with my parents after leaving my grandma’s emptied house; the hand-painted pot we bought from a native artist in her home in Zia Pueblo that still sits in my dining room; the Ponderosa pines at the north rim of the Grand Canyon we pressed our noses into, inhaling their Tollhouse-cookie vanilla scent.
Something as simple as an album can hold all this, and more.
How do we not get heavied with all that memory, like pockets filled with every pretty stone we’ve ever picked up on the beach?
I’ve been reckoning with change, as many of us have in these times. The question driving much of my art seems always to have been: how do we love that which is changing?
Perhaps it’s all here, in these lines from “In Blackwater Woods,” by Mary Oliver:
“To live in this world / you must be able / to do three things: / to love what is mortal; / to hold it / against your bones knowing / your own life depends on it; / and, when the time comes to let it go, / to let it go.”
I used to believe love was a form of allegiance to a particular set of circumstances and beliefs. A repetitive ritual of attachment and nostalgia: here, let us play this same song, let us make this same recipe, let us remind one another of an ever-growing list of memories or inside jokes. The turkey dumplings after Thanksgiving. The cottage in Maine we preserve like a relic. Even the same art, made again and again, like some oath of fealty we swore to a process that may have gotten too small for us.
If you hold on tight enough, you can keep all the love you’ve ever felt. You can eat the waffles with strawberries again. You can go back to the same restaurant where you took your daughter as a baby. You can play the same album on repeat. You can do it again and again.
But sometimes memories roll around so much, over and over, that they’re like that pair of black pants all threaded with cat hair and lint and dust bunnies. It stops even feeling like love, and feels somehow hollow or constricted, a little numb. Grasping, trying to relive the past, which is an impossibility.
How do we put ourselves through the wash, find our way back around to love that feels more like a deep, full breath, a shimmering aliveness, a discovery?
How do we stay present?
I think the answer is as simple and as difficult as this: we tell the truth.
Oh fuck.
We tell the truth even when it shakes the voice. We tell it even if we don’t know if it will be true tomorrow. If it’s true today, it’s the bridge we have to cross to get to tomorrow.
Most of us are afraid to tell the whole truth. We’ve lived most of our lives inside systems and relationships that don’t really want to hear it, not all of it, anyway. Not the whole mess, not the confusion or doubt, not the pain or the anger, not the disappointment, not the irreconcilable paradoxes.
Thankfully, some of us are practicing a new way. We are trying to learn the liberation of attempting to meet ourselves deeply enough to be with all of it. To reconcile our conflicting inner voices like a loving parent would with scrabbling siblings. To witness ourselves with a full willingness to melt the icebergs of old grief even if the waters rise inside and we’re scared of drowning. To stay, slowly and patiently, in the stuck place where the branches have pressed against the riverstones, and not make it wrong, but be willing to learn what must be learned, for as long as it takes, until the flow comes again.
In this process, we can learn to give one another more grace. Suddenly my friend’s anger doesn’t scare me, once I’ve fully met and loved my own. Your stuckness doesn’t have to feel so threatening, if I remember that I don’t have to hate my own, but instead can respect what it’s trying to teach me.
I used to think love meant holding on tight, and promising to stay the same. Now I think it means being present with what is: including memory, including grief, including hope. Including change, which means, sometimes, letting go.
I helped a friend unload her entire built-in bookcase yesterday. She’s selling the home she’s lived in for nearly a decade, through raising a child, through the end of a marriage, through the beginning and painful end of a deep soulmate love, through the death of her father. The house is heavy with memories, many of them hard, and she’s ready for a new chapter, a fresh energy. Her realtor wanted her to reorganize the bookshelf to put the books in rainbow order, and she was exhausted at the thought of it, so I volunteered.
One by one, I pulled first all the red books off the shelf, then the oranges, then yellows, on down to the tall stacks of blacks. Each book a whole world, each book a tendril to an aspect of identity, each book a little hook to a time of life, a self who bought it, a self who tucked a note between its pages. A self who wanted something different from this life. A self who contained love and hope, grief and fear. A little love note from her son tumbled to the floor, from where it had been wedged behind books for who knows how many years. My god, it would have been so much for her to touch at a time she’s already processing so much change. I felt so grateful to be able to do this one task for her. In each book I took down, I felt the wholeness that transcends change. She is the stream, the soul, the one who chose and read these books, but that doesn’t mean each one needs to be kept around forever. All the love that existed in the pages, and in the house, remains. Transcends time.
I think a life doesn’t have to feel so heavy when we can learn to let love feel like full presence: a stream of timelessness, a full-bodied capacity for just being with what is, all that is. A willingness to grieve, to sob for hours a day in certain seasons, because sobbing for hours a day is the only way to love while also letting go.
I’m sitting here allowing myself to know that I can love this album even though I don’t want to be the self I was in 2007. I can love this life even when it’s confusing. I can love the memory of the stained-glass candle even if the candle itself is long gone.
We can keep getting big enough to hold one another in the truth.
