LETTERS FROM LOVE — With Special Guest Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian!

Dear Lovelets,

Every week when I read through the comments, I see names that have become familiar to me over the last years that we have been creating this project together, this shared space where we gather once a week to practice learning how to write to ourselves, how to speak to ourselves, from a place of unconditional love.

With some of you, I am starting to recognize your voices, and learn your stories — even though I would not know you by your faces, and know nothing about your ages, your backgrounds, or where you live. Certainly I don’t know what any of you do for a living. But I know what unconditional love sounds like when it is channeled through your unique voices. And taken collectively, it’s an incredible choir.

And some of you I am just meeting. Every week there are a few new souls who jump into the mix — sometimes after years of “sitting poolside” for whatever reason (shyness, privacy, or maybe just waiting to see if this practice is really for you).

I’ve said it before: you don’t have to do anything to belong here with us. Let there be one place in the world where nothing is expected of you. AND, holy moly, I do love seeing a newcomer’s first published letter from love. It’s like watching a butterfly emerge and give its wings that first tentative, quivering flap.

A Lovelet named Linda wrote last week that she has been part of this community since its inception, and has written notebooks filled with her own letters from the spirit of unconditional love, but “today I decided to leave my poolside chaise and sit on the top step of this wondrous pool.”

And the letter Linda shared reminded me so much of myself — especially the bit about having earned “a PhD in Impression Management” from the age of five, constantly striving to be perceived as good, as smart, as worthy, as belonging.

I get it. I have that same advanced degree myself — as do, I believe, many of us in this community.

And yet I am learning as I get older how to be authentically myself — and sometimes even how to be authentic in public. Or, scariest of all, rarest of all, I am learning how to be myself in the crucible of my most intimate relationships.

My hope is that this community continues to be a place where you — old-timers and newcomers alike — feel consistently safe to be seen. Whoever you are, we welcome you. If you want to be here, you belong here. And whenever you are ready, you can share your letters with us. Or never. Never also works. We just love you, that’s all.

Our special guest this week is the brilliant Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian, whose genre-defying book FOREST EUPHORIA: The Abounding Queerness of Nature made my whole brain expand by about 85% when I read it last year. Her letter is about wanting something with all your heart, and then not getting it. Her letter is about how we survive our most heart-breaking disappointments. Her letter is about love, and like her book, it is gorgeous.

Let’s keep going,
Your Lizzy

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Dear Love, what would you have me know about not getting what I desire?

Do not shut your heart to life, sweetie. Before we get into any details, this is the primary thing. If we could have whispered something into your ear right at the moment of your birth (and we did, dear, we did) that message would have been: do not shut your heart to life.

A subheading to that message, or perhaps we could say the reason for that message, would have been this: because you will not get what you desire. Nobody will get exactly what they desire. It is not possible. It is not what this journey is about.

You will get some of what you desire, of course — everyone does — but even that can be a dangerous ride. For you know that just as sugar sends you looking for more sugar, and success sends you looking for more success, a desire once sated is rarely satisfied for long. Desire sends you looking for more desire. It is hard for a human mind not to want more, ever more — whatever that “more” might be. More love, more glory, more power, more money, more happiness, more things, more health, more time, more, more, more.

But we are speaking philosophically, and philosophy does not bring comfort, it just brings more words.

Shall we speak more specifically? Can we go to the heart of your heartbreak?

You desired Rayya, more than you have ever desired anything or anyone, and for a very short time you were given Rayya. And for that very short time, you could not imagine ever needing anything again. She was the answer to everything. We don’t need to get into the details of how much you loved her, or what that love delivered, but that love was real. To her, and from her, that love was real. You loved her so much that you knew you would be okay somehow, even when she died. Because you knew that the love the two of you shared would be enough to fuel you for the rest of your journey, that you would be able to let her go, because the love was so big, so nourishing, that you would never have a painful desire again. You were fed, and that love would feed you forever.

Then came the plot twist. Driven by the pain and fear that cancer brought upon her, she started doing drugs again. And while we don’t need to get into the horrors of that season of your life again, we will confirm that you were absolutely correct when you said to Rayya in tears, “The god of this house used to be love, and now the god of this house is cocaine.” That is correct. That is what happened.

That is when you lost Rayya. Not to a bodily death from cancer — which you had been expecting, and which you truly could have handled as long as the love bond did not break — but to addiction, which destroys love. Which destroys everything.

In your most shattered moment, you raged at God: “Why would you let me taste this perfect love, only to take it away?”

It’s a really good question, honey. One to which we, love, do not have a simple answer. We know that it is no comfort to be told that God takes everything away, eventually. We also know that it is no comfort, really, to look around and see what others have lost. To be in the company of others who are brokenhearted brings solidarity, but not relief. As Richard From Texas told you once, “Comparing your suffering to the misery of others is a pretty substandard way to make yourself feel better.”

We agree.

Where is relief to be found, then, when that which you most desire is taken away from you? Whatever that desire — that love, that need — may have been? How do you make yourself feel better?

Draw nearer, little one. Come sit in our deeply loving presence, as we try to explain something to you, as we try to help you understand. Maybe even let go of the need to “feel better” and just sit with us in the magnificent, blazing light of truth.

Here is what we want you to know.

The stream of life is one unified thing. The stream of life is not a series of ups and downs, gains and losses, happiness and sadness, pleasure and suffering. Life is an endless, unified stream of being that includes all the ups and downs, gains and losses, happiness and sadness, pleasure and suffering. Life is a cohesive single event, a magical everything.

We beg of you not to waste the strange gift of life dividing it into good and bad events — things you wanted or didn’t want; desires met and thwarted; good days and bad days; soaring love and broken-heartedness.

The stream of life is not even divided into days at all, per se. The stream of life is one glorious, magnificent, vivid, wild experience. And what we ask is that you do not close your heart to it — to life itself, which is a gift not to be mastered, controlled, or even always enjoyed, but to be experienced.

Instead of praying for relief, or praying to get what you desire, can you imagine a way of being in which you fall so deeply in love with the experience of life itself that you let go into it, fall back into it, and let it happen to you, however it is going to happen to you?

Are you willing to experience pain, just to continue to experience life-ness, fully awake?

Can you imagine marveling as much at the defeats as the victories? Can you imagine finding a sense of miracle not in a good day or a bad day, but in the sheer existence of a day itself? Can you imagine loving the vast happening (not any particular part of it, and certainly not the outcome)?

Instead of weeping over things not going the way you wanted, can you imagine never forgetting to marvel over this vast question, which you have heard mystics and scientists wonder about for years: “Why is there something instead of nothing?”

Not “Why is this happening?” or “Why is this not happening?” but “Why IS?” Period. The most astonishing question of all.

Keep your heart open to the is-ness of it all, my love — to the fullness of the entire unified stream of being. This is what we invite you to fall in love with. The radical, strange, impossible-to-understand miracle of existence itself.

I can assure you that this — the is-ness itself of life — is what we love. Which is why we can love everything that is happening, and why we love you no matter what state of being you happen to be in, or whether you have won or lost.

That’s our unconditional, uninterrupted reality — could it be yours?

Open your heart to it all, is what we are saying. You will not get all that you desire. Nobody does. But you might get something even bigger.

That is all for now, sweetie. Do not close your heart to life. We love you. Let’s keep going.

Our subject this week centers around yet another universal human experience. Though the details differ, it feels very safe to claim that we have all been there. This week, we are pondering the nature of desire and the extensive scale of (very valid) emotions that comes with not getting what we want: disappointment, agony, relief, surrender. Together, let’s pose this question: Dear Love, what would you have me know about not getting what I desire?