If they weren't your parents, could you love them completely?
In spite of everything?
Hello Beautifuls!
It’s incredible to me, but I just hit 300 subscribers. To be exact, 306 as of this posting. I started 18 months ago and at first it was just a few readers, friends and family, and then more people read and more people shared and I am just grateful and delighted that something I want to share with others resonates.
The biggest thing I want in this world is to love more and help others (and myself!) not feel alone. Because even though I’m a serious introvert, I love humans and I want people to know they are loved.
So I’m a little teary now, and that’s fine.
So much thanks to everyone who has read and shared and commented, it’s because of you ❤️ing or sharing or restacking or recommending my posts that more and more people are finding Hello Beautifuls and we’re having the beautiful conversations we’re having here.
Please keep doing it! 🙏🎈
It’s also okay if you’ve just read and been quiet. Thank you to you too.
Well, I left myself a little note over the weekend that said, “I want to start off with how beautiful it is here on Substack and the tree analogy and how I am blown away by the kindness and sharing and vulnerability here.” Well, my loves, I don’t remember the tree analogy anymore. I try to leave myself more detailed notes because if it’s not down on paper, then it isn’t anywhere. It’s been that way my whole life. I took copious notes in school. I was always in awe of the kids who just jotted down a phrase here or there. I always wondered, but what if you need that OTHER word?
As far as the trees, maybe I was thinking of redwoods and how they grow in groups, near the parent tree, for sustenance. Maybe I was thinking about the tips of the cedar trees here, how the new growth looks thin and delicate, but there is so much potential wound up inside that bursts out as the tree grows. Or maybe it was how pinecones spin their seeds out into the air and the pointy end, where it used to be attached to the cone, sticks in the ground for safekeeping through the winter into spring. I don’t know, but they’re all nice to think about. Maybe it was just that I love talking to trees like I love talking to you.
Speaking of parents and seeds and love, this week I wanted to share my Letter from Love from this Sunday. Some of you have already read it and I hope that’s okay. It seemed to really resonate and I keep reading it over and over again, the message is so strong for me in so many ways.
I hope something in this letter resonates in your heart and that you feel loved. Always. Because you are.
A note on Letters from Love. These are not meant to be edited or essays or anything other than us trying to listen to capital-L Love and see what it wants us to know about something. The prompt this week was parents. Oof.
Dear Love, what would you have me know about my parents?
What if my love, what if, your parents were given to you? Instead of you being given to your parents? And what if, my love, you were given to yourself?
What if you could love your parents like you wish they had loved you? And what was it you wished? That they loved you perfectly, without judgement, without any of their own self inflicted on that love.
But you know, my sweet dove, from being your own grown up human, that we are never really grown up, that we get bigger and more experienced in this human life, but we are still the children we were. We still carry the wounds and the grief and the loss, but we also still carry the wonder, the curiosity and the love that we were born with. You do, your parents do, all humans do.
Maybe, as part of a generation that has better tools, more language, more support to understand your whole self, maybe you can give your parents what they were not able to give you. Or maybe, for we know there are others who will read this, maybe that is not possible, there is too much hurt or abuse or woundedness, or maybe the parents aren’t there, and then, my loves, it is about being that parent for yourself, to yourself. How would you talk to yourself, treat yourself, touch yourself, look at yourself in the mirror if you loved yourself they way you wished (and maybe expected) your parents to love you?
Because, my sweetest, sweet plumb, there is no one here who has the power you have to love you the way you want to be loved, besides you.
You are the one with the power, not your parents. It has always been this way, though it doesn't seem so when you are one and two and five and six and they are yelling at you and at each other and at the world. But believe us when we say, my beautiful darling, that you are the one who can love yourself like no other.
You are also the one who can love your parents the way you wanted to be loved, because we all want to be loved that way. And just as your parents couldn’t give that kind of love to you, they never received it either. Could it be that they were given to you so you could love them like that? Fully, in all their brokenness? in all their anger and rage, all their faults and shortcomings and cruelties?
Our question is to you, my sweet doll baby, what do you have to lose?
What do you have to lose in letting your heart be so big it can encompass everything, all the hurt all the pain all the fear all the abuse all the not-enoughness all the abandonment, all the hateful words and cruel inattentions? What if you heart was big enough to hold all of that and love - recklessly, with abandon, with the grace of rain on parched skin. Because my love, their skin is as parched as yours is, maybe even more.
If they weren't your parents, could you love them completely in spite of everything?
We know you can, because you are love, and so are they, you are all pieces of god, getting confused and wounded by all this humanness.
There is nothing that stops you from loving everything and everyone all of the time except your mind and your memories that only see this one lifetime, from one perspective.
Love is infinite my loves, love is not based in boundaries, or needing to be safe, or keeping score or woundedness. You can have all these things and still love with your whole heart. It isn't an either or situation you're in. It's both, it's all. It always was, always is and always will be. There is no single answer to feeling better as a human, except to love more.
If you’re not over in the Letters from Love space, you can check it out
. We call ourselves Lovelets and it’s just beautiful over there.With so much love,
j
xoxo
This is the letter that moved me so! Just beautiful. ❤️👏
This post resonates with love! XO