What Would a Love Fool Do? Cultivating Honeymoon Mind

It was a banner year for daylilies, and they gilded the bottom of every early summer scene like some magical fire that stoked passion and beauty without ever reducing the world to ash. Black bears and foxes emerged from between the multiflora bushes that exuded scents so delicate they seemed like molecular poetry stitched in care and sacred syntax into the air by some invisible poet. Civil dusk – that blue summer hour after the sunset where the shadows disappear but every tree seems to glow like a lantern still burning with a wick of daylight – stretched and stretched past its regular hour.

Summer was brighter, bolder. And every encounter yielded surprising connections, laughter, and opportunities. An 18^th century farmhouse sitting on my favorite mountain stream was somehow available for rent for the laughably small amount that I could afford. A ghost-writing gig landed in my lap the day I began to worry about money. And then another. The flea market vendor had the pair of perfectly worn in Levi’s that had been tailored by some earlier owner to my exact dimensions. And when I slipped them on and felt them cinch me into my own skin, my precise shape, I felt like those Levis were a metaphor for my experience: everything felt lucky, tailored to my exact dimensions and desires.

Only six months prior I had been cycling in and out of anaphylaxis, spinal issues, cascading nutrient deficiencies, and mysterious kidney injuries fueled by autoimmunity. Recently diagnosed with Ehlers Danlos after years of degenerating health, I was facing a laundry lists of issues and symptoms I was supposed to prepare for if I didn’t already experience them. I’d graduated college and been too sick to continue into grad school. While my peers moved to cities and higher education, I’d moved back in with my parent’s knowing full well that this might be the final move of my life.

How did I end up in one the most charmed summers of my life only months later?

There are several different answers and they are all equally true. One is that I managed to survive and climb out of a moment that seemed dire by sheer force of will. Another is that I remembered my love of writing stories and started writing The Madonna Secret, letting the erotic energy of creation kindle me into resilience.

But as someone who struggles with ongoing health issues and autoimmunity, I am very curious about the brief moments in my life where I have experienced something not exactly like remission but close to a radical diminishment in symptoms and increased physical vitality. What allowed these moments to happen? They almost never correlate to a new treatment or conscious lifestyle change.

No. The moments my autoimmunity has briefly stood down have correlated very precisely with the moments when I have fallen in love.

I’m not talking about crushes or brief intimacies. I’m speaking of those rare moments in a human lifetime when you grow wings on your feet and suddenly you can hover just a bit above the grit of daily life, gliding where you might otherwise drag or stumble.

When I actually look at the facts of that summer, it was not at all charmed. I was very poor, shouldering massive medical and student loan debt, recently graduated, stringing together freelance gigs and beginning what would become a near decade long process of trying to launch a career as a writer under my own name. I was seven years deep into declining health with only a handful of safe foods and had recently been told all the ways I should prepare to fall apart by the specialists of my condition. I was struggling navigating this complexity with my young able-bodied friends, feeling increasingly isolated in upstate New York years before the influx of young people and creatives during Covid.

And yet, somehow none of this mattered. I could dodge every obstacle without a thought. I felt lucky…which in a sense made me more available to lucky circumstances. This is a phenomenon I’ve been curious about my whole life. I am luckiest when I think I’m luckiest. I can’t game it.

I am luckiest, I am shiniest, I am most generous with others, most expansive and charitable, when I believe I am luckiest. And I believe I am lucky when I am in love.

We’ve all seen and experienced this in our own lives. We run into a friend and she seems cast in rosy light, bubbling, suddenly wittier. We are not surprised when we hear her news.

There is someone. And there is something with this someone. There is reciprocal passion. There is a big confidence vote from the universe that things can work out. That someone wants to return our loving gaze with their loving gaze. I believe that moment when two loving gazes intersect is an an ecotone of miracles, the shoreline of interfacing otherness where a third term emerges: the trinitarian quality of new love is that it briefly produces a child of good luck that can benefit anyone – even casual bystanders - in its wake.

I was a more thoughtful, more patient friend during this period. A happier, more enjoyable daughter and sister. And my immune system was convinced by the placebo effect of so much lightness, so much trust in the universe, that it performed a magic trick of calming down, reducing my inflammation and briefly delivering me a moment of improved health.

Most importantly my love spilled over from my human lover into the Hudson Valley: the salamanders and chanterelles, the daylilies and bears, the goldfinches and bluestone mountains. I was a better lover of my wider ecology. And although that human lover is now gone, that wider, ecological love put down roots and leafed and branched and overtook my entire life.

Three years ago, I did not feel lucky. I was forced during one of the most severe moments of intersecting health crises to move twice in six months. My eyesight had degraded such that I could hardly see. I was covered in rashes and could hardly eat, developing a laundry list of weird ailments only Victorian consumptives could usually boast of (scurvy and severe mercury poisoning). And amidst this a random scan revealed masses in my lung that doctors initially thought might be cancer.

I was also four years out of the collapse of my long-term relationship that had lasted through my twenties, four years deep into increasingly depressing dating and extended situationships that laughed at my earlier faith in romance.

But I remember sitting in my new house, surrounded by unpacked boxes and medical bills, thinking about how bitter I felt and how that bitterness made me meaner, stricter, and less gracious with friends, family, and strangers. The more cursed I felt, the more cursed I became. And with the news that we couldn’t biopsy my lungs given my poor health and that I would have to live with constant scans and uncertainty for the next year, I realized I had to change something.

I needed to find my faith in the universe again and wake up that daylily fire in my heart. But I knew that I couldn’t wait for the slot machine of the universe to deliver me a win.

I had to make my own good luck. As spring turned into summer and my new rental flooded, partially destroying my library, as my kidneys glitched in and out of dysfunction, as wildfire smoke thickened the air, I started to ask myself this question.

Would this feel difficult if I was in love? How easily would I slide through this if I was in love? How much more patient would I be with my parents, my friends, my brother, if I felt like I was carrying a lit fire of love within me?

What would a love fool do? They would sing. They would find an escape hatch out of a tight spot. They would unfurl a picnic blanket and invite the entire neighborhood.

The question didn’t deliver me to a lover. But it opened a door. And it literally had me opening the door to my new home, stepping out onto my oak-tree shaded porch, noticing the pair of mated red-tail hawks that lived in my new backyard, noticing the fawn a mother deer took to leaving in the barberry buses near the woods, making me feel proud that I had in some way been designated as the good vibe, hands off babysitter for her child.

Bears arrived. Coyotes and foxes streaked in front of me. The more I tried to cultivate what I was calling “honeymoon mind”, the more nourishment seemed available from the world. And as I drank in rainbows and dove song, creek swims and monarch butterflies, I started to feel something emerge that had deeper foundations than the surface storm of human love.

I wanted to orient towards life as my widest, most expansive, luckiest self. I wanted to be a safe place for a deer to trust her fawn. For the birds to roots. I wanted to orient into life as a love fool. I started to understand that Honeymoon Mind was not something that happened to you, gifted through external intervention. It was an active and embodied choice. It was a way of orienting into my life to find the downhill, the compassionate gradient that pulled me toward community and creativity.

Honeymoon mind has not diminished the difficulty of living with chronic and incurable illness. It has not delivered me to a partner or a family.

What it has done is relaxed my fist so that my hands fall open to catch feathers, raindrops, paws, leaves, flower petals, other hands.

Falling in love doesn’t depend on another person or a healthy body or a perfect scenario. Falling in love is a lens - a mode of interpretation. It is a way of orienting towards circumstances that feel tragic and confining. When you can’t change the facts, it helps sometimes to be a fool who doesn’t know that failure is an option. When you turn towards the world with love, it always sends back song and fragrance and invitations to wider more-than-human community.

This is the seventh installment in my ongoing series Confessions of a Romantic Animist.

I want to reclaim romance as a celebration that includes the entire earth. I want to throw another party. A love party. And I want to invite you along.

I’m going to take the same approach to love stories as I took to myths of the masculine in The Flowering Wand. I will reroot, rewild, and retell classical love stories within an ecological framework. I’m also going to write about my fascination with contemporary romance, animal courtship rituals, and fantasy. I have questions about how romance is a powerful tool in combatting and dismantling empire and I’m going to think and write through them in real time in conversation with you.

Most of the essays in this series will be offered for free. I want to think and love and dance with you. But alongside this series on courtship, ecology, fantasy, and eros, I’m also going to offer reading lists and excerpts for of my upcoming fantasy series: one inspired by Joan of Arc and the other a queer retelling of Tristan & Isolde for my paid subscribers as well as occasional personal essays on romance.