These last two weeks, I’ve been playing with the idea that love is “feral and imaginative.” I ran into a recording recently where ALOK Vaid-Menon shared that their goal is to fall in love with the world—and that they could do it without fear because when we give our love away, we don’t have less love to give. We have more.
So why are we so stingy with it?
ALOK put it more poetically than I ever could: What if I was courting the sun? What if every day I was on a date with the wind?
It’s almost hard to imagine chasing love that ambitiously. Honestly, it can be a little scary to even consider.
But I’ve noticed that when we come across someone who genuinely seems to live from joy and love, we sit up and take note.
Dolly Parton is a good example.
I’ve been learning more about her lately as my own way of honoring her life. She laughed. She loved everyone. She said, of course, she’d treat people the way they told her they needed to be treated, because her job—her religion—was to love, not to judge.
She had fun, she stayed connected to people’s hearts even from a distance, and she did it by staying steady in her convictions through small daily acts—random notes and phone calls, changing her own business’s name when she learned how to love better, funding literacy and childcare for kids around the world—all while carrying a joy and humility that were hard to deny.
Everyone has been “claiming” her these last couple weeks. And perhaps, if you’re like me, she hasn’t faded quickly from your thoughts the way so much does in our relentless news cycle. Perhaps you’re still listening to her silliness in interviews, watching her movies, and singing her songs.
I think that’s because we all recognize, somewhere in us, that love is what the world actually needs—and that she got that more than the average human.
We want to hold that close.
And yet the way we get closer to love is by being more expansive with it!
So how do we grow our love every day? How do we learn to give more freely from a resource that never runs out? How do we reach and stretch ourselves in ways we didn’t even know were possible?
What would it look like to show a kindness to yourself, or to someone else?
What might it feel like to embody love every time you felt the wind or the sun on your skin—and what if you shared that feeling out loud through acts or words?
I believe we honor the people we lose by living into the values they treasured most.
So let me know: How will you grow your love today?
Love, Renee