The Impulse of Love

This is one of a set of posts about my season of cancer. It began with "A new journey."

     The other night, I attended a large function that privately I was calling "my coming out party". It was Maine Conservation Voters' "Evening for the Environment" which is always jam-packed with the people who tirelessly and with some inexplicably bottomless optimism keep trying to protect Maine's natural resources and fend off climate change. These are my people. I know and value a lot of them. A lot. And I had not yet emerged into a public venue since my cancer diagnosis became widely known.

    This is not about the tremendous love I got -- and gave -- there, though in some way it does all tie in. This is about a story that the speaker, Richard Louv, told us. Richard Louv is a hero. His 2005 book Last Child in the Woods named an insidious fear many of us sensed was rising in young people alongside the ascending infatuation with "smart" technology: a disconnection with the natural world he called "nature deficit disorder". He had data. He tied it to physical and mental illnesses. By naming this, he created a cultural pivot point and started a movement getting children back outside.  
I will bet that everyone in that room could point to a time or place where they had a transformational experience in nature, whether standing in the dawn light at the top of a building in Manhattan, floating in a lake at Girl Scout Camp, or watching whales rise on a whale watching boat tour. Connection with the profound otherness of the wild is like a turbo-boost of life-force energy. Now doctors are literally prescribing time in nature for their young patients. We gathered to listen to what else Richard Louv had to say*.
     He told this story: One morning a young mother walked into her dining room where her six-year old was lying on the carpet alongside their family dog, Jack. He was stroking the dog's fur. It was a peaceful scene. Then the boy spoke. "Mommy, I don't have a heart anymore". The mother was startled. Then he said, "My heart is in Jack". 
     The impulse to love is native in us.
     With my cancer diagnosis has come great clarity. There is no reason to be shy or protective about loving. And there is no reason to deflect love when it comes to you.
     I am a great lover. I was blessed to be raised with safe love, and with constant access to nature. And I married the most amazing man who not only loved me but let me love him with the full energy of my love. That second part is huge: the impulse to love needs outlet. We all need to give love, open the faucet, not hold back.
     Now I am on the receiving end of that. Love is flowing in to me in voluminous quantity. It's astounding, humbling, and invigorating. I do not want to be in the cancer seat, but now that I am here I must say out loud that the impulses of love coming from everyone is a real, felt thing.
     It's like I'm at the center of a wheel, and all these spokes of energy coming from every direction are literally holding me and filling me with unbounded joy. How can this be? -- I have cancer! My answer: I don't know. Perhaps it is that I am not my body, I am my spirit. The love coming in generates joy, delight -- and gratitude. Gratitude, I've learned, is entwined with the impulse to love.
     I stood in the predawn dark/light again this morning, awed at the sharp silhouettes of the pines against the glow on the horizon - rose-cantaloupe is my name for that color. One step further from the house and the crescent moon slid from behind the roofline. I gasped at its unexpectedness. Bob came out. "Look. Look!" I said. We stood together in silence. And then I blurted "How can anyone not be in love when you see this?"
     The impulse of love. It doesn't have to be manifest as a gift, a hug, a dinner, a card, flowers, a wedding vow. The energy of love itself is real. I feel it strongly now, coming in. I feel it flowing out of me as joy. It is connection. It is gratitude. It most certainly is beautiful. It is natural, native to us. It is life-force energy. It is who we are. It is little. It is big. It is between a boy and a dog; it flows through a room of five hundred people on an October evening.
     I am grateful. I accept. And I give you my love.

*Richard Louv's new book Our Wild Calling will be in book stores in November.