Plant Your Love and Let it Grow
“I have spent my life trying not to love people, and trying not to want people love me. Yikes.”
Yikes, indeed.
I made this discovery and wrote these words four years ago today.
It was so monumental that, as you see, I put stars around it in my journal.
I had no idea that every moment of my life had been spent in a battle trying not to love the people I love, because I thought my love wasn’t allowed.
Or rather, I had felt that battle every moment of my life, I just hadn’t understood that the shattering pain I carried came from trying not to love.
It was just life to me, carrying the weight of being fundamentally unlovable, and trying to live in a way that did not inflict my love on others.
And I mean inflict.
This is what I learned from the voices that mattered in my young life ... That my love was a burden. Along with feeling unlovable herself, rendering her unable to receive my love and leading her to reject and punish it as manipulation, my mother was also deeply threatened by anyone I loved. I always had a sense that I loved the “wrong“ people, and she made it powerfully clear that it was wrong to love the people who were kind to me.
I was “supposed“ to love the people like her who hurt me, because the ones who were kind to me were doing something wrong.
It was such a gift getting to discover a few years ago that I truly had grown-up understanding closeness and “love“ to be cruelty and pain, with kindness reserved for the outside world.
I always understood that I was wrong for loving the people I loved, both because they were kind to me, and because my love somehow hurt them.
It had never occurred to me that maybe I was allowed to love them.
This discovery was a changing moment on my journey.
And that was before the single most phenomenal thing ever to unfold in my lifetime happened.
An hour after I wrote these words, my phone dinged.
It was a message from my favorite artist and human, a person I absolutely did not hear from, and the person on the planet I was trying hardest in that moment not to love.
After months and months of dreaming of getting to sing with him, he was inviting me to do just that ... The next morning.
An hour after this monumental discovery that I’d spent my entire life in the shattering pain of trying not to love, the person I loved more deeply than anyone who had ever graced my path showed up out of the blue, inviting me to sing these words with him:
“Plant your love and let it grow,
Let it blossom, let it flow.“
It happens that the morning we sang those words together, I bravely asked this seriously big time singer/songwriter (well, big time compared to me!) to sing on my record.
Miraculously, he said yes.
After a terrifying conversation in the studio, we landed on singing that song on the record as well, and it could not have been a more perfect choice.
It was the third song we discussed, as that magical morning hadn't yet happened when I was initially dreaming of having him sing! That conversation in the studio is probably the one in my lifetime I'm proudest of walking through. He pretty much said no to my first two suggestions, and I felt HORRIFICALLY wrong for having made them in the first place. I mean, I felt like I had committed a crime against humanity; I don't know when I've ever felt quite such heavy and intense shame.
I felt like I was physically sinking into the floor.
It was excruciating.
Somehow, though, I kept walking though that conversation with this man who may as well have been Springsteen for the space he occupies for me, and suddenly the power of that song and the moment it showed up came to me.
I will never have sufficient thanks to him for singing those words with me.
You can hear it here! Or anywhere you get your digital music.
Say what you will about my having spent more than four years in the space of loving this man completely from afar. A space my heart has known is where I need to be, because I’ve had things to heal before I’ll be able to be a loving, rather than a wounding, presence.
I promise you, even if something had been possible with him four years ago, had I not done this healing work, I would’ve destroyed it before it even began, as I had every relationship I’ve ever been in.
I also would have been the same shattering presence in his life and the lives of his precious little ones that my mother and stepmother were in mine.
Perhaps my love wouldn’t have been "inflicted" on them, but my wounds absolutely would have been.
This space of solitude and healing - loving him from exactly where I am and with every cell of my being - is without question where I need to be in this moment.
Moments like this one four years ago are the kind that show up in the space of that love.
All. The. Time.
They're sometimes few and far between, but nearly always that profound.
My heart knows things.
These are stunning moments in my life, and I am unimaginably grateful.