The assignment was to fall in love. The details were up to you.

-Louise Glück-

This was a recent contribution to the near daily morning message exchange with a friend. Our on-line conversation began during the Pandemic and we have kept it up…sometimes a photo, sometimes a song, often a snippet of a work or a quotation. We have shared numerous other lines from Louise Glück; however, this pair…it kept up with the pace of my moving through the day, never lagging and not pestering–simply present and engagingly unavoidable.

And isn’t that the way it can be with Truth…and all of the questions and levels of reflection that go along with it…

I read these lines from the 2020 Nobel Prize winner and thought immediately, Yes. The assignment given was to fall in love. To exercise love, focus it, fall into it, live with it, converse with it, discover it, share it, breathe it, be shaped by it, to know it as one knows the contours of a favourite living thing…how it weathers the seasons, changes, blooms, withers, creates more of itself…

So many things—moments, acts, bits of beauty, aches I thought I could not bear, grace, challenge…So. Many. Things…have shown me over and again that I have indeed fallen in love. I have fallen in love with life, with wonder, with language, music, art, people, nature, God…

Also, it made me think about the details over the course of time. And, whether it was me filling them in at all. Cultivating them from seeds planted, perhaps…certainly Love does not reveal its nuances and facets all at one go—It would be a bit much to bear, I’d think, if it did. The details have instead been revealed along the way…and oh, so far, it’s been more than I could ever imagine…in all kinds of ways.

Love as the Fibonacci glory of dahlias in the Gardens—What other force, energy, act of creative generation, would arrange itself so wildly, so diversely, and beg to be beheld? Love as age twenty-something children of a dear, also loving, friend who choose to be available when I came visiting just to hang out together. Love as the difficult honour of loving someone who needed their freedom more than a connection with humanity. Love as the light no darkness can overcome. Love that will not let go her hold and abandon her people. Love that is the swell of emotion behind notes, behind verse, within the syllables of a hand-written letter, sometimes within the brevity of a text, or the crayoned stick-figure with an outsized head and extraordinary eyelashes and labeled with your name. Love as the landscape of the sea—its moods and its glinting; love as the challenge to discover more of one’s fullness, one’s wholeness; love that is tail-thump and the gentle placement of a paw or furry head; love as the quiet cradling of a space where you can Be utterly at home and settled with God, with self, with creation. Love that calls onward with the promise of wonders greater than can be hoped for or imagined.

What an assignment…