What Would Love Say Today?: 100 poems in 100 days Volume I

PROLOGUE

This book came to life as an experiment, from a reality of what Love is not. It all started with a blow-up conversation, well, several, actually. And a lingering question around, what is it that escalates painful interactions? In the middle of it all, at the core of the escalation, I found fear. Fear brought denial and lies. Fear brought blame and disconnection. Fear brought more fear and pain, doubt and defensiveness. Resentment and exclusion.

In the middle of a significant personal and professional transformation, it became clear that for the work I was meant to do in this life, I absolutely needed to express myself through pure Love, without a trace of fear. I already knew expressing through fear was clearly ineffective. Even if I was afraid, I was going to have to learn to express it through Love. But what did that even mean? No idea. I just knew I had to learn it.

Simultaneously, I was reading The Voice of Knowledge, by Don Miguel Ruiz, who caught my attention with his Toltec perspective of love.

How can you believe someone who says, I love you, and then treats you with disrespect and emotional violence? How can someone say, I love you, when that person wants to control your life, to tell you what you have to do, what you have to believe? How can someone claim to love you, and then give you emotional garbage, jealousy, envy?

How can we tell someone, I love you, and then send all our opinions against the person we love to try to make that person suffer? I have to tell you what is wrong with you, because I love you. I have to judge you, find you guilty, and punish you, because I love you. I have to make you wrong all the time, and make you feel like you are good for nothing, because I love you. And because you love me, you have to put up with my anger, my jealousy, with all my stupidity.

Do you think this is love? This is not love. This is nothing but selfishness and we call it love. (Ruiz, 174-175)

Wow. That woke me right up. It further opened the intrigue… "if that wasn’t love, what was love?"

Meanwhile, in a poetry series I had started a few weeks prior, David Whyte, the brave and brilliant Anglo-Irish poet, had just invited us to explore unresolved grief, by connecting to the feeling and writing directly from there; to see what grief had to say through a conversation (2020). Other than one or two poems here and there, I had never written poetry, so, green behind the ears, I tried it out wholeheartedly. To my surprise, the elements of a long-buried heartbreak emerged into a poem that wrote itself and left me lighter, wiser, and feeling more whole. The experience was incredibly liberating; the voice that spoke came from such a deep truth I didn’t realize was inside. 

It’s important to presence, that the context of all of this unfolding coincided with the time of George Floyd’s murder, in the wake of so many others, horrifically kneeled on by a police officer until he could no longer breathe. It was a clear declaration of systemic fear, by this white man in a position of authority, exemplified through this addition to long-standing systemic racism. Covid 19 was just starting to gain momentum, contributing its own chaos, and affecting the breathing systems of thousands of people around the world. We were expected to stay home. These synchronistic threads reconnected me to the preciousness of breathing - the essence of life itself.

Back to the drawing board of our collective society, the emerging practices of healing collective trauma and heart-centered living were paralleling and counteracting our unhealthy paths. Other inspiration came from John Lewis's memoir, Walking with the Wind (1998), Bryan Stevenson's exceptional work standing for integrity in the US justice system, and the inspirational peace-building work of the MOSAIC Project in the Bay Area, led by Lara Mendel and Brian Lowe. And complementary to the social justice, was the work of Doctor Ramani, Dr Les Carter, and Lisa A. Romano focusing on surviving narcissism.

While I may not mention these directly in the poetry, they brought grounding and sanity, as they fused with my explorations. What if instead of having a system of centralized fear we could have a decentralized system of Love? What if everyone had their own direct access to Love? What would a whole system of Love be