How do you love the world?

Please tell me.

How do you love the world?

It’s one question, but also two, depending on the emphasis.

1. How do you love the world?

2. How do you love the world?

The first is a question of intentions and actions. It’s more theoretical, perhaps. More grandiose and aspirational. Not to discount theory or aspiration, mind you. We must dream and reach towards who we want to be, how we would like to show up. So, I think it’s a worthy question to begin: How do you love the world?

Ellen Bass’s poem, To Love Life, encapsulates perfectly an awake and merciful love for the world. It’s a poem I return to again and again because it offers an answer. This is how you do this heartbreaking, necessary thing, she tells us. This. Again and again. This.

I am anxious nearly constantly these days. But when I can find enough stillness to dip underneath that flurry of worry what I realize I really feel is grief. Grief that the world continues to be much meaner and more horrifying than I know, I just know, it can be. Grief for people I’ve already lost, and anticipatory grief, such a close cousin to anxiety, for those I will inevitably lose. Grief for Gaza and Ukraine, and for everyone everywhere caught in the crosshairs of conflict they did not initiate or choose. Grief for the world we are leaving our children, for this country, and for the planet— the trees and water, the creatures and the soil.

As Ellen writes, an obesity of grief. How can a body withstand this?

But, perhaps, that is the benefit of getting older, slowly gaining the surety that the body can, and does. If we are steadfast and, admittedly, lucky, we go on. We get to the other side, lay things down, or simply learn to carry what cannot be released.

Once, in my mid-twenties, I was years into an enormous grieving over the ending of a relationship. Though, in hindsight, the grief was as much about what I thought the world was going to be like once I got away from home as it was about him. Where I thought I might find healing, redemption, or perhaps just relief from my burdens. Eventually, my grief and anxiety were so entangled, I was unable to see beyond the end of my own nose or talk about anything other than myself, my pain, and confusion. I was self-obsessed and, honestly, tiresome to be around.

A friend who taught at a small, community pottery studio finally offered me one of the most loving corrections I’ve ever received. She took me to the studio, sat me in front of a wheel, slammed a hunk of clay down in the middle, and said, “Please shut up and make something.”

I was embarrassed and a little ashamed, but also sort of sick of myself, too, so I did what she told me. I stuck my hands in that smooth hunk of Earth and made something. Eventually, lots of somethings. And my grief and anxiety, eventually, lessened as the wheel spun, becoming small enough to carry. Or maybe the truth is I became bigger around them, so they simply seemed smaller in comparison.

Author Rebecca Solnit, in her newsletter, Meditations in an Emergency, wrote this week:

If the private and the personal were all we wanted, all we cared about, there would be no resistance and we'd just each be taking care of ourselves and our immediate
connections and goods, not the whole. But so many of us love justice, love
human rights, love equality, love the ideas, ideals, principles we are
defending right now while they are under attack as never before in this
country. We are often told anger is our superpower or secret weapon, but I see
(and experience) what gets called anger as protective energy, and you don't
feel that way about things you don't love and value. So the starting point and
heart of it all is love.

I don’t throw pots any more, but I do protest, and it was good to be reminded that protesting is one answer to the second iteration of our starting question for me. Gathering in the streets with my loved ones and neighbors to march, chant, and sing is how I climb outside of my own navel and get my hands dirty. It is one of the ways I love the world.

There will be thousands of gatherings happening for No Kings Day this Saturday, June 14, while Donald Trump will be celebrating himself with millions of dollars worth of military spectacle in D.C. Celebrating himself on the heels of his authoritarian moves to commandeer the National Guard in L.A.. Celebrating himself in the wake of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem empowering her goons to manhandle and handcuff a sitting senator for daring to ask her a question at a press conference. Celebrating himself in the midst of escalating round-ups of immigrants by masked, highly armed shock troops while they look for work, attend their children’s graduations, and dutifully show up for their immigration appointments. Celebrating himself while he pushes forward a budget bill that will harm millions.

If you are able, I hope you will find a gathering and join us to show the world what love can look like.

There are many ways to love the world, though, and I’ll tell you another of mine. This week, my son and I had a purchase offer accepted for 37 acres of woods in the hills outside of town. An overgrown pond, a trailer, a shed, and 36 acres of trees and creeks and leaf littered hills, to be exact.

Those of you following along at home know this has long been a dream of mine. It’s also been a dream of his, to live in the woods and build a house with his own two hands. For myself, I will take a platform with a tent on it for weekends. Hopefully, eventually, a little cabin. No electricity or running water. Just me, the quiet, the trees, and a path through the woods to some of the people I love most in the whole world.

I need these pendulum swings in how my love shows up. To be out in the thick of humanity, standing up for what I believe in, and then also out in the woods, kneeling down. My heart yearns towards grand, aspirational ideas and also to hold the world right in front of me close to my face, close enough to kiss it. Both/and. Love/love.

What about you, my friends? How do you love the world? How?