Love

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I adored my legs - my legs which, while they had had skirts about them, I had scarcely had a thought for; but which were, I discovered, rather long and lean and shapely.I sound vain. I was not - then - and could never have been, while Kitty existed as the wider object of my self-love. The act, I knew, was still all hers. When we sang, it was really she who sang, while I provided a light, easy second. When we danced, it was she who did the tricky steps: I only strolled or shuffled at her side. I was her foil, her echo; I was the shadow which, in all her brilliance, she cast across the stage. But, like a shadow, I lent her the edge, the depth, the crucial definition, that she had lacked before.It was very far from vanity, then, my satisfaction. It was only love; and the better the act became, I thought, the more perfect that love grew. After all, the two things - the act, our love - were not so very different. They had been born together - or, as I liked to think, the one had been born of the other, and was merely its public shape. When Kitty and I had first become sweethearts, I had made her a promise. ‘I will be careful,’ I had said - and I had said it very lightly, because I thought it would be easy. I had kept my promise: I never kissed her, touched her, said a loving thing, when there was anyone to glimpse or overhear us. But it was not easy, nor did it become easier as the months passed by; it became only a dreary kind of habit. How could it be easy to stand cool and distant from her in the day, when we had spent all night with our naked limbs pressed hot and close together? How could it be easy to veil my glances when others watched, bite my tongue because others listened, when I passed all our private hours gazing at her till my eyes ached of it, calling her every kind of sweet name until my throat was dry? Sitting beside her at supper at Mrs Dendy’s, standing near her in the green-room of a theatre, walking with her through the city streets, I felt as though I was bound and fettered with iron bands, chained and muzzled and blinkered.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  When Andy Mingo entered my life, I’d walk around at my job or the grocery store or the beach or bars or parties kind of wanting to tug on someone’s shirt and say, “Um, I need to say something about men. Turns out? I was wrong. There’s something … I can’t put my finger on it, but there’s something sort of … vital about them. Doesn’t that beat all?” Or I’d be mid-lecture or mid-mouthful of food or mid swim lap and think “Hey - somebody - I want to note that I’m feeling something. It feels a little like my heart is breaking. Like breaking open. Do I need medical attention? Is there a pill? What should I do?” Or I’d be in medias res lovemaking, I mean mind blowing lovewaves with this … this … man creature from another planet and think “I really, really need to go get a different degree to understand this mutual respect and compassion and fleshheartmind hunger business. A Ph.D. just doesn’t cut it. I’m quite clearly under educated. Can I speak to someone in charge?” The one thing I didn’t think? Drink it away. Possibly the only strong thing I’ve ever not thought. That’s why I say I didn’t get god. Everything I ever loved about books and music and art and beauty all became recollected in the body of the man I met who hit the bag and played the cello. After that we started arranging rendezvous all over town. Hungry. Frenzied. Did I mention he was married? Yeah. Well. What did you expect? I’m still me, after all. We met on benches at the ends of piers in San Diego where he’d make me cum with his hands down my pants at the end of a pier while tourists and seagulls and fishermen stretched out behind us. We met on the beach with the surf pounding and the sunset cliffs and one night even when I finished coming and sang my siren song a bunch of hippies in the cliff shadows put down their spliffs and gave me a standing ovation. We met in bars where we sat next to each other on red leather stools and pressed knees and shoulders and mouths together so hard I’d find bruises in the morning. With my fancy job money I bought us weekends back in Portland or San Francisco with rich people hotel rooms and room service and porn channels and 300 thread count sheets that we soiled and soiled. He said “Sometimes love is messy.” It’s true his almost not anymore wife chased me in her O.J. white Ford Bronco. But our lovers story isn’t the only story. Though our affair was epic. And sordid. Narrative and passion have that in common. There’s a story under that one.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  Later I would think it marvellous that there had ever been a time I hadn’t known it.Now, when Kitty said it, she flinched. ‘Toms. They make a - a career- out of kissing girls. We’re not like that!’‘Aren’t we?’ I said. ‘Oh, if someone would only pay me for it, I’d be very glad to make a career out of kissing you. Do you think there is someone who would pay me for that? I’d give up the stage in a flash.’ I tried to pull her to me again, but she knocked my hand away.‘You would have to give up the stage,’ she said seriously, ‘and so would I, if there was talk about us, if people thought we were — like that.’But what were we like? I still didn’t know. When I pressed her, however, she grew fretful.‘We’re not like anything! We’re just - ourselves.’‘But if we’re just ourselves, why do we have to hide it?’‘Because no one would know the difference between us and - women like that!’I laughed. ‘Is there a difference?’ I asked again.She continued grave and cross. ‘I have told you,’ she said. ‘You don’t understand. You don’t know what’s wrong or right, or good ...’‘I know that this ain’t wrong, what we do. Only that the world says it is.’She shook her head. ‘It’s the same thing,’ she said. Then she fell back upon her pillow and closed her eyes, and turned her face away.I was sorry that I had teased her - but also, I am ashamed to say, rather warmed by her distress. I touched her cheek, and moved a little closer to her; then I took my hand from her face and passed it, hesitantly, down her night-dress, over her breasts and belly. She moved away, and I slowed - but did not stop - my searching fingers; and soon, as if despite itself, I felt her body slacken in assent. I moved lower, and seized the hem of her shift and drew it high - then did the same with my own, and gently slid my hips over hers. We fitted together like the two halves of an oyster-shell - you couldn’t have passed so much as the blade of a knife between us. I said, ‘Oh Kitty, how can this be wrong?’ But she did not answer, only moved her lips to mine at last, and when I felt the tug of her kiss I let my weight fall heavily upon her, and gave a sigh.I might have been Narcissus, embracing the pond in which I was about to drown.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  We had no time. We had no energy. We had no money. What we had was making art in the woods. So when Andy turned to me one night over scotches and said “We should invent a Northwest press that isn’t about fucking old growth and salmon,” and I laughed my ass off, and then said, “Yeah, we should,” we just … did. Which is how the zenith of our depletion changed into the zenith of our creative production. Andy and me, we had another child. An unruly literary press, which we named “Chiasmus.” Turned out, there were lots of writers in the Northwest who were tired of old growth and salmon. Our first publication was an anthology called Northwest Edge: The End of Reality. Because, you know, it was. Everything we were before we were this, utterly transformed. Shakespeare. In our forest we gave art to life, and life to art made us. Angina I KNOW. I’M MAKING ANDY SOUND LIKE A MAGICAL MANSAVIOR. You’re going to have to forgive me. It’s an effect of meeting someone who is your equal. It’s an effect of an astonishment: that I love men. And it’s not like we have some relationship from a movie. For instance, in the beginning, we fought. Boy howdy. I fought like a woman whose father had betrayed her and whose mother abandoned her. He fought like a man who never had a father and whose mother’s heart didn’t quite reach him. Working out our childhood wounds at each other. Because … because we could take it. Because there was something on the other side. People - I guess I mean couples - don’t like to talk much about fighting. It’s not attractive. No one likes to admit it or describe it or lay claim to it. We want our coupledoms to look… sanitized and pretty and worthy of admiration. And anger blasts are ugly. But, I think that is a crock. There is a kind of fighting that isn’t ugly. There is a way for anger to come out as an energy you let loose and away. The trick is to give it a form, and not a human target. The trick is to transform rage. When I watch Andy work the heavy bag, or work his body to drop doing mixed martial arts, I see that anger can go somewhere - out and away from a body - like an energy let loose and given form. Like my junk comes out in art. Though like anyone else, our arguments are sloppy and dumb and artless. We look like cartoon adults, just like everyone. Like the time he put all our living room furniture out on the lawn. Or the time I grabbed his computer mouse and bit the cord in half. Yeah. Subtle. But I gotta tell you. People who never get angry frighten me. Andrew: man-warrior. From the Greek. Lidia doesn’t mean jack-shit, by the way. Figures.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  ‘Ah! but if you had seen her then as I did in her humbler, gentler moments, remembering that she was only a child, you would not have reproached me for cowardice. In the early morning, sleeping in my arms, her hair blown across that smiling mouth, she looked like no other woman I could remember: indeed like no woman at all, but some marvellous creature caught in the Pleistocene stage of her development. And later again, thinking about her as I did and have done these past few years I was surprised to find that though I loved her wholly and knew that I should never love anyone else — yet I shrank from the thought that she might return. The two ideas co-existed in my mind without displacing one another. I thought to myself with relief “Good. I have really loved at last. That is something achieved”; and to this my alter ego added: “Spare me the pangs of love requited with Justine.” This enigmatic polarity of feeling was something I found completely unexpected. If this was love then it was a variety of the plant which I have never seen before. (“Damn the word” said Justine once. “I would like to spell it backwards as you say the Elizabethans did God. Call it evol and make it a part of ‘evolution’ or ‘revolt’. Never use the word to me.”)’ * * * * * These later extracts I have taken from the section of the diary which is called Posthumous Life and is an attempt the author makes to sum up and evaluate these episodes. Pombal finds much of this banal and even dull; but who, knowing Justine, could fail to be moved by it? Nor can it be said that the author’s intentions are not full of interest. He maintains for example that real people can only exist in the imagination of an artist strong enough to contain them and give them form. ‘Life, the raw material, is only lived in potentia until the artist deploys it in his work. Would that I could do this service of love for poor Justine.’ (I mean, of course, ‘Claudia’.) ‘I dream of a book powerful enough to contain the elements of her — but it is not the sort of book to which we are accustomed these days. For example, on the first page a synopsis of the plot in a few lines. Thus we might dispense with the narrative articulation. What follows would be drama freed from the burden of form. I would set my own book free to dream.’

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  These hairy women - they were - they were mythic. As a kid, I had no idea what they were in real life - students, girlfriends of something, females who used hand-held hairdryers, people who shopped at the mall with purses and drove cars around - but at the pool and in the locker rooms they were mythic. I think that’s why I remember so many of their names, these larger than life to a kid women - Jo Harshbarger and Evie Kosenkranius and Karen Moe and Shirley Babashoff. Lynn Collella Bell. I used to walk around the locker rooms and toddle dreamily out to my mom’s car looking up at the sky with LynnCollellaBellLynnCollelaBellLynnCollellaBell making song loops in my skull. LynnColllelaBell with the broadest shoulders and teeniest hips I’d ever seen. Making me hippoventate. Is it any wonder that by the time I was 12 I could barely keep from biting one of them? All that flesh and wet. Me standing forever in the hot shower staring and staring and I’m pretty sure drooling … it’s a wonder I didn’t pass out in all the dreamy steam and crack my skull open. For a long time I thought there was something wrong with me that I wanted to lunge at one of them and hump them like a little monkey. At home, in bed, alone, I’d get on my stomach and butterfly kick my bed to death. Or maul a pillow grinding my hips and clenching my knees around it. Finally it got so frustrating - this whatever it was I had in me - I had to resort to hair care items like brushes and combs and rubber bands. Snap. Yeah? Have you ever tried it? Then shut up. You know, now that I’m thinking of it, it didn’t even occur to me to put something UP IN THERE. I didn’t get my period until I was much older due to my athlete body, and no one, not my mother, not my sister, not any of my friends, not my swim coach bothered to explain the manwoman sex thing to me. I mean of course I figured it out later, what with television and film and so forth, and my slutty friend Kelly Gates who explained it to me while I barfed a little in my own mouth, but for a good long while, and you know, even today if I sit too close to one, I thought I might die from wanting to rub myself raw on a girl.

• From Justine (Alexandria Quartet vol. 1) (1957)

  But by some curious paradox it was these very defects of character — these vulgarities of the psyche — which constituted for me the greatest attraction of this weird kinetic personage. I suppose in some way they corresponded to weaknesses in my own character which I was lucky to be able to master more thoroughly than she could. I know that for us love-making was only a small part of the total picture projected by a mental intimacy which proliferated and ramified daily around us. How we talked! Night after night in shabby sea-front cafés (trying ineffectually to conceal from Nessim and other common friends an attachment for which we felt guilty). As we talked we insensibly drew nearer and nearer to each other until we were holding hands, or all but in each other’s arms: not from the customary sensuality which afflicts lovers but as if the physical contact could ease the pain of self-exploration. Of course this is the unhappiest love-relationship of which a human being is capable — weighed down by something as heartbreaking as the post-coital sadness which clings to every endearment, which lingers like a sediment in the clear waters of a kiss. ‘It is easy to write of kisses’ says Arnauti, ‘but where passion should have been full of clues and keys it served only to slake our thoughts. It did not convey information as it usually does. There was so much else going on.’ And indeed in making love to her I too began to understand fully what he meant in describing the Check as ‘the parching sense of lying with some lovely statue which was unable to return the kisses of the common flesh which it touches. There was something exhausting and perverting about loving so well and yet loving so little.’

• From Wild (2012)

  She wanted us to remember that, and I did. It felt like she was with me always, metaphorically at least. And in a way it was literal too. When we’d finally laid down that tombstone and spread her ashes into the dirt, I hadn’t spread them all. I’d kept a few of the largest chunks in my hand. I’d stood for a long while, not ready to release them to the earth. I didn’t release them. I never ever would. I put her burnt bones into my mouth and swallowed them whole. By the night of my mother’s fiftieth birthday, I loved her again, though I still couldn’t bear to let the Judy Collins songs come into my head. It was cold, but not as cold as the night before. I sat bundled in my tent wearing my gloves, reading the first pages of my new book—The Best American Essays 1991. I usually waited until morning to burn whatever pages I’d read the night before, but on this night, when I was done reading, I crawled out of my tent and made a fire of the pages I’d read. As I watched them ignite, I said my mother’s name out loud as if it were a ceremony for her. Her name was Barbara, but she’d gone by Bobbi, so that was the name I spoke. Saying Bobbi instead of Mom felt like a revelation, like it was the first time that I truly understood that she was my mother, but also more. When she’d died, I’d lost that too—the Bobbi she’d been, the woman who was separate from who she was to me. She seemed to come at me now, the full perfect and imperfect force of her humanity, as if her life was an intricately painted mural and I could finally see the whole thing. Who she’d been to me and who she hadn’t. How it was she belonged to me profoundly, and also how she didn’t.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  And each night Andy would put his hands on the mound of me and whisper secrets to the little boyfish refusing any narrative but his own. Sweet hidden life in the water of me - the best thing I had to give. And he would suck the milkworld of me and our lovemaking rose and became enormous with my body, with our broken rules broken codes broken law love, every night our bodies making a songstory bigger than the lives we came from. The more my belly grew the more love we made. At eight months I began to wear my enormity with a pride I’d never known. It is the pride of big bellied mothers who don’t fit your story of them. If I glowed, it was with the heatsurge and flush of a sexuality that goes to bed in some other women when they are big with life. Our bodies forming more positions of lovemaking than painted in books from India. If I seemed maternal, it was the maternal grimace and fire of Kali - had anyone crossed me I’d have a head necklace. I’d go out of my way to wedge into elevators filled with condescending faced colleagues. In my head I’d think, I am the woman you teach from literature. But don’t teach me as voiceless this time. This time, I am yelling. I am larger than you. I am not sorry. Do your worst. I’d sit in department meetings staring down the tenured women POETS and spit on their so-called feminism. I’d catch the cross glances of the philandering tenured literature old man balls and shoot shame eyes at them for turning on me when I had accepted their excuses for the line of women outside the academic doors of their lives. My belly grew. My belly carried me. My belly carried our love, bulging between our shit faced grinning. The grinning of life and joy finally coming to you when all you knew was how to suffer. When the time came I taught writing up until the day before I went into labor. I taught at that idiotic hypocritical place that had already fired me for the coming year two days after my son was born. I taught writing instead of pregnancy leave. I brought my little man with me to my graduate seminars in a carrier. I breast fed openly. I taught writing. I taught it well. Ask those students who graduated. Some of whom got jobs. And books. Sometimes his little man voice drowned us out. I laughed the laugh of mothers. My thirst to go numb began to leave my body. At eight months I married Andy Mingo at the courthouse. I wore a deep red vintage silk Asian dress, my belly enormous but stylish. It’s the only marriage I have no wedding photo of. However.

• From The Chronology of Water (2011)

  Once Michael came to visit when Philip and I still lived in Eugene. After the baby died. Philip and I were nothing about each other. I had already begun a new chapter with Devin in a house across town. Philip worked at Smith Family Bookstore by day, and by night he painted in a one-room efficiency somewhere else. The plan was that Michael would visit Phillip for a few days, and then spend a couple with me. But on the second day Michael showed up on my doorstep at three in the morning. I opened the door. He looked like ass. He had his suitcase with him. He said, “I can’t stay in that fucking efficiency. It reeks. There’s cat piss and shit and oil paint everywhere. The guy doesn’t live like a human.” And I let him in. It was then that I knew that we had both loved Phillip. Together. Deeply. And that both of us left Phillip. Divorced him. Forever. Unable to understand how to live with his brilliant, passive hands. It was a sacred truth between us. After Devin and I divorced, Devin went to visit Michael and Dean in Seattle, I guess wanting to feel like they were still his friends. I hated knowing he was there. My Michael and Dean. Goddamn you, Devin. But then Mike called and told me, “All he wants to talk about is how many times a day he fucks the womanchild. I don’t give a shit how many times he screws the infant. GAWD. It’s so juvenile.” The next day he called again and said, “Devin drank all the alcohol in the house while we were at work. I think he stole one of our pans. And some of Dean’s CDs. He’s never staying here again.” I know it’s petty. Idiotic. But I loved him so much for telling me that. When Andy and I were first getting together, it was hard. Andy was still married. So we had a couple of rendezvous out side of San Diego. One of them was in Seattle where Mike and Dean lived. They had moved there from Dallas sometime after my baby died. They moved there for work, I’m sure - both of them are astonishingly talented graphic designers. But to me it seemed that Mike had moved to Seattle to be closer to me. I mean I wished it was true. I wished the moment when he said one afternoon “We should live closer together,” the afternoon we downed 12 beers in a row in my house in Eugene, was somehow why he was near. It’s the wish of a child.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  It was dry and limp, and its petals were brown at the edges and coming loose; and it was rather flat, because I had slept many nights with it beneath my pillow.‘When you threw this to me,’ I said to her, ‘my life changed. I think I must have been - asleep - till that moment: asleep, or dead. Since I met you, I’ve been awake - alive! Do you think I could give that up, now, so easily?’My words startled her - as well they might, for I had never spoken like this before, to her or to anyone. She looked away from me, about the room, and ran her tongue over her lips. ‘And all of them, downstairs?’ she said, nodding towards the door. ‘Your mother and father, your brother, Alice, Freddy?’ As she spoke there came a shout, and the sound of voices raised in friendly argument.They mean nothing to me, I wanted to say, compared with you ... But I only shrugged, and smiled.She smiled then, too. ‘And so you really will come? We must leave on Sunday, you know - a week from today. It doesn’t give you long.’I said it would be long enough; and she placed the faded rose upon the bed, and seized my hands and squeezed them hard.‘Oh Nan! My dear Nan! We’ll have such times together, I promise you!’ As she spoke, she flung my hands aside and gripped me in a fierce embrace, and laughed with pleasure, so that I felt her body shudder in my arms.Then, all too soon, she stepped away, and I had only empty air to clutch at.There was more noise from below, then the sound of a door opening, followed by the thud of feet upon the staircase, and a cry: ‘Nancy!’ It was Alice. She paused outside the bedroom door, but was too polite - or fearful - to turn the handle. ‘Everyone is leaving,’ she called. ‘Mother says will Miss Butler just step down for a moment, please, for them to say good-bye.’I looked at Kitty. ‘You go on,’ I said, ‘without me, and I shall come down in a minute. And don’t,’ I added in a lower voice, ‘say anything to them about - our plans. I’ll talk to them about it, later on.’She nodded, and gave my hand another squeeze; then she opened the door and joined Alice on the landing, and I heard them step below, together.I stood in the gathering shadows and put my trembling fingers before my face.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  We had lived and slept and laboured, side by side, for half a year; but there had been a kind of veil between us, that our cries and whispers of the night before had quite torn down. She looked flushed, washed - new-born; so that I could hardly press her skin, for fear of marking it - so that I feared, almost, to kiss her lips again in case they bruised.But I did kiss them; and then I lay, quite at my leisure, and watched as she splashed water on her face and arms, and fastened on her underclothes and frock, and buttoned her shoes. As she worked at her hair I lit a cigarette: I struck the match and let it burn almost to my fingers, gazing at the flame as it ate its way along the wood. I said, ‘When I first knew you, I used to think that, whenever I thought of you, I was all lit up, like a lamp. I was afraid that people would see...’ She smiled. I gave the match a shake. ‘Didn’t you know,’ I said then, ‘didn’t you know, that I loved you?’‘I’m not sure,’ she answered; then she sighed. ‘I didn’t like to think of it.’‘Why not?’She shrugged. ‘It seemed easier to be your friend ...’‘But Kitty, that’s just what I thought! And oh! wasn’t it terribly hard! But I thought, that if you knew I liked you as a, as a sweetheart - well, I never heard of such a thing before, did you?’She moved to the glass to work again at the pins in her plait, and now, without turning, she said, ‘It’s true I never cared for any other girl, like I care for you ...’ As she said it I saw her neck and ears grow pink, and felt myself grow weak and warm and silly in response; but I caught a glimpse of something, too, behind her words.‘It has happened before, then,’ I said flatly, ‘with you...’ She grew redder than ever, but would make me no reply; and I fell silent. But the fact was, I loved her too much to want to fret for very long about the other girls she might have kissed before me. ‘When was it,’ I asked next, ‘that you began to think of me like ...

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  People everywhere need others to lean on. Social support is a lifeline. My guess, though, is that when you visualize offering social support to someone, you imagine another person as weak or suffering in some manner. In your mind’s eye, you might visualize your friend in the hospital, your neighbor’s child having just fallen off his bicycle, or your coworker near tears under the strain of crushing demands. Yet the latest research documents that offering social support when things go right is a more efficient way to build relationships than offering it when things go wrong. In fact, it’s precisely those moments in which you celebrate another’s good fortune that let him or her know you truly care and instill faith that you’ll lend a hand during tougher times ahead. It can take practice, however, to recognize and respond to others’ good fortune in this healthy, life-giving and relationship-strengthening way. You may need, after all, to break long-standing habits of resentment, self-diminishment, or indifference. Try the next activity to open your heart to celebratory love. Try This Meditation Practice: Celebratory Love Find a location where you can sit undisturbed. Place your feet flat on the floor and adjust your position and posture until your body feels both alert and open. Lengthen your spine as if it were an antenna. Lift your heart as if you were offering it up as a gift. Take a few slow and deep breaths, bringing your awareness to each as it rises and falls. Then bring your awareness to your intention for this practice session. Perhaps it’s to learn to be an even better friend, or to reduce pernicious envy and instead learn to celebrate others’ successes. Know that good events—both seemingly minor and major—are abundant in other people’s lives. Sometimes, all it takes is to awaken from the trance of self-absorption to see this abundance pouring forth. Throughout the session, bring your awareness to your heart region from time to time. Take time to notice how your practice is affecting your body, even your face. As ever, the sentiments and bodily sensations you create are more important than the particular phrases you repeat to yourself.

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  If you have difficulty summoning your good qualities, try sidestepping this obstacle by imagining how those who care for you might see you. Be like Saint Francis to the sow. Imagine for a moment stopping the busy pace of your daily life. See yourself stopped, freeze-frame, in the midst of your daily activities. Now imagine: Approaching you in this freeze-framed moment is someone who cares for you, someone who, at one time or another, has appreciated you and shown you warmth. This could be a mentor or a dear friend, your partner, parent, or another loving relative, either alive now, or long gone. Imagine that this person’s intention is to remind you of your long-forgotten loveliness. Perhaps like Saint Francis, he or she rests a hand on your brow and reminds you, in words and in touch, of your good qualities. What would he or she say? What would you remember? What image of yourself would emerge? Try This Meditation Practice: See Yourself as the Target of Others’ Love You can circumnavigate your own particular obstacles to self-love by visualizing the cherished people in your life themselves engaged in the well- wishing that typifies LKM, whether or not they have actually practiced this technique formally. Imagine all your beloved mentors and friends, all your treasured family members, standing in a circle around you. You are now the center of each one’s attention and loving regard, the hub of this imagined social gathering. Just as, in LKM, you extend your own wishes for each of them to feel safe, happy, healthy, and at ease, the feeling is often mutual. These other people wish for you to feel safe, happy, healthy, and at ease. Visualize how it is that you might be represented in each of their minds and hearts. On to which of your good qualities would they shine a light? Gently hold those descriptions of you that surface in your mind and let them soak in. Recall your many actions that underlie these characterizations of you. Allow yourself to see those actions as deep indicators of your worth. Draw sustenance from the positive regard in which these cherished others hold you. Relax yourself into its warmth, feeling the safety and security it offers you. Now visualize the unfurling of good wishes emanating from each person’s heart to yours. Like the spokes of a wheel, these wishes connect the outer ring of your circle of supporters to you, its hub. At this point, you might visualize all of those gathered speaking the classic phrases of LKM in unison, with your own name inserted: May you, [your name here], feel safe and protected. May you, [your name], feel happy and peaceful. May you, [your name], feel healthy and strong.

• From Tipping the Velvet (1998)

  I had friends and cousins, as any girl must have who grows up in a small town in a large, old family. I had my sister Alice - my dearest friend of all - with whom I shared a bedroom and a bed, and who heard all my secrets, and told me all of hers. I even had a kind of beau: a boy named Freddy, who worked a dredging smack beside my brother Davy and my Uncle Joe on Whitstable Bay.And last of all I had a fondness - you might say, a kind of passion - for the music hall; and more particularly for music-hall songs and the singing of them. If you have visited Whitstable you will know that this was a rather inconvenient passion, for the town has neither music hall nor theatre - only a solitary lamp-post before the Duke of Cumberland Hotel, where minstrel troupes occasionally sing, and the Punch-and-Judy man, in August, sets his booth. But Whitstable is only fifteen minutes away by train from Canterbury; and here there was a music hall - the Canterbury Palace of Varieties - where the shows were three hours long, and the tickets cost sixpence, and the acts were the best to be seen, they said, in all of Kent.The Palace was a small and, I suspect, a rather shabby theatre ; but when I see it in my memories I see it still with my oyster-girl’s eyes - I see the mirror-glass which lined the walls, the crimson plush upon the seats, the plaster cupids, painted gold, which swooped above the curtain. Like our oyster-house, it had its own particular scent - the scent, I know now, of music halls everywhere - the scent of wood and grease-paint and spilling beer, of gas and of tobacco and of hair-oil, all combined. It was a scent which as a girl I loved uncritically; later I heard it described, by theatre managers and artistes, as the smell of laughter, the very odour of applause. Later still I came to know it as the essence not of pleasure, but of grief.That, however, is to get ahead of my story.I was more intimate than most girls with the colours and scents of the Canterbury Palace - in the period, at least, of which I am thinking, that final summer in my father’s house, when I became eighteen - because Alice had a beau who worked there, a boy named Tony Reeves, who got us seats at knock-down prices or for free.

• From Worried about Everything Because I Pray about Nothing (2022)

  God wants us to surrender to Him this way. Why? Because He’s a despot? Some celestial tyrant bent on control? No. Because He loves us, and we love Him. This is a mutual surrender, in a sense—God has already promised to be with us, to care for us, to listen to us, to respond to us. He has chosen to link himself to us, which is a crazy thought. We are in a committed relationship, and if that relationship is going to survive fire swamps, rodents of unusual size, and the ups and downs of regular life, there needs to be trust. Surrender means giving up control or ownership of something. If you have ever prayed the Lord’s Prayer (in the last chapter, for example), then you’ve asked God, “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” That is surrender, at least in a general sense. Surrender, however, needs to be a lot more personal than just a blanket prayer for an entire planet. It involves asking God to do His will in the practical, day-to- day decisions you make—finances, marriage, career, character, friendships. It is a surrender motivated by love and trust. Jesus prayed this way. Remember the garden of Gethsemane, just before He went to the cross? “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will” (Matthew 26:39). It’s easy to think of Jesus as some emotionless deity who really didn’t mind dying. After all, that’s what He came for. And He knew in advance about the whole resurrection plot twist. But Jesus was just as human as you or me. He felt physical sensations and had bodily weaknesses. He experienced emotions. And He knew what awaited Him when He was arrested. Matthew records that three times on the night before He was arrested, He asked God not to send Him to die. But each time, He ended His prayer with a variation of, “Your will be done” (verses 39, 42, 43). It’s unlikely any of us will face the death penalty for obeying Jesus. Our struggles are real, but they at least don’t involve crucifixion. This prayer is still just as relevant, though, and as powerful—and as difficult. We like to cling to

• From Emotional Inheritance (2022)

  In my New York City office now, thirty years later, I gather information about him and ask about his military service. He tells me the name of his unit and I write it down and nod. I remember the day my band was sent to perform on the base of that unit. Nothing about it felt unusual or dramatic, except that I was in love with the drummer of the band and was happy that it was too dangerous for us to drive back home that night, and that we had to stay and sleep there, in Khan Yunis, Gaza. It was 1989 and I remember that we were given guns and told they were in case of emergency. I didn’t remember how to use the gun although I had been in basic training just a few months earlier. My best friend and I had agreed that killing someone was bad karma, so during training we just made believe we had listened but ended up having little idea how to use the gun. On our way to Khan Yunis, it didn’t feel like a big deal. In case of emergency, we thought, we would manage. The special-unit soldiers sent us an armored bus, and a motorcade accompanied us as we drove into Gaza. The roads were bumpy and at some point the musical producer of the band, an older man in his thirties who was a musician and served in the unit as a reserve soldier, decided to sit on the floor of the bus. We looked at him, amused, and asked, “Hey, what’s going on? Is everything okay?” To our surprise, he started to cry. “My wife is pregnant. They didn’t tell me we were going into Gaza. I didn’t sign up for that. This is crazy.” We all looked at one another and didn’t know what to do. We didn’t understand why he thought it was so crazy. We had traveled to every war zone and never thought any of it was especially intense. This was the world we were raised in. In some ways, the unstable national security and our mandatory army service felt like an irrelevant disruption, and life was about the future, not the present moment or the past. It was made up of hopes and big dreams, pushing against our external reality with deep friendships, with love, and with music. I turned around and smiled at the drummer, and he smiled back.

• From Wild (2012)

  We’d married so young, so uncharacteristically, even our parents asked why we couldn’t just live together. We couldn’t just live together, even though I was only nineteen and he twenty-one. We were too wildly in love and we believed we had to do something wild to demonstrate that, so we did the wildest thing we could think of and got married. But even married, we didn’t think of ourselves as married people—we were monogamous, but we had no intention of settling down. We packed our bicycles into boxes and flew with them to Ireland, where a month later, I turned twenty. We rented a flat in Galway and then changed our minds and moved to Dublin and got a matching pair of restaurant jobs—he in a pizza place, me in a vegetarian café. Four months later, we moved to London and walked the streets so destitute we searched for coins on the sidewalk. Eventually, we returned home, and not long after that my mother died and we did all the things that we did that led us here, to Val’s office. Paul and I had clutched each other’s hands beneath the table, watching Val as she methodically examined our do-it-yourself no-fault divorce documents. She inspected one page and then the next, and on and on through fifty or sixty, making sure we’d gotten everything right. I felt a kind of loyalty rear up in me as she did this, unified with Paul against whatever contrary claim she might make, as if we were applying to be together for the rest of our lives instead of the opposite. “It all looks good,” she said at last, giving us a reticent smile. And then she went back through the pages again, at a brisker clip this time, pressing her giant notary public stamp against some and sliding dozens of others across the table for us to sign. “I love him,” I blurted when we were nearly through, my eyes filling with tears. I thought about pulling up my sleeve and showing her the square of gauze that covered my brand-new horse tattoo, as proof, but I only stammered on. “I mean, this is not for lack of love, just so you know. I love him and he loves me …” I looked at Paul, waiting for him to interject and agree and declare his love too, but he remained silent. “Just so you know,” I repeated. “So you won’t get the wrong idea.” “I know,” Val said, and pushed the pink hank of her hair aside so I could see her eyes fluttering nervously from the papers up to me and then down to the papers again. “And it’s all my fault,” I said, my voice swelling and shaking. “He didn’t do anything. I’m the one. I broke my own heart.”

• From Love 2.0: Finding Happiness and Health in Moments of Connection (2013)

  Even if you have a hard time populating the circle with people who you know appreciate you, you can populate it with any or all of the people around the globe who have—or have ever—practiced the ancient technique of LKM. After all, each one of these people—whether an aging widow in Thailand, a thirtysomething prisoner in Texas, or His Holiness the Dalai Lama himself—has practiced extending the wishes of loving-kindness to all people, because all people yearn for and deserve to feel safe, happy, and healthy, and to live with ease. Perhaps it can help you to visualize yourself as tucked into the masses of humanity for which others have extended their earnest expressions of love. Loving-Kindness for Yourself When you’re ready—perhaps after you’ve eased your way in by sidestepping your own obstacles using one or more of the strategies just described—try experimenting with directing full-on loving-kindness toward yourself, following the ancient traditions of LKM. Again, it can be tempting to avoid or minimize this portion of the practice, for all the same reasons previously discussed. Stay alert to the possibility that you may disguise your neglect of self-love as humility or as selfless compassion for others. These rationalizations can be common. Move past them. The idea here is simply to experiment with and explore self-love using your personal experiences as your data. As you experiment, notice areas of resistance and become curious about them. Although by definition, areas of resistance beg you to turn away, decide in advance instead to hang in with them. Witness how you experience resistance and even lean in toward it. I can guarantee there’s more to learn by leaning in than from turning away. When you avoid a challenge like this, you forfeit opportunities for experiential learning that yields wisdom. Yet when you approach these areas of resistance, your return on this investment is better awareness and understanding, both of yourself and of love. Knowing that it can be all too easy to zoom past using yourself as your target as you begin your LKM practice, you might decide up front that you’ll focus exclusively on yourself for several weeks. Even mark off this time on your calendar. This is in fact how LKM has been taught to the participants in my team’s research studies. The very first guided meditation our study participants are offered focuses exclusively on the self, and they are instructed to stay working with this particular meditation daily, for the first two weeks. This is not self-indulgence.

• From Wild (2012)

  They got into the front and we drove. I looked out the window, at the towering trees whipping past, thinking of Eddie. I felt a bit guilty that I hadn’t mentioned him when the women asked about my parents. He’d become like someone I used to know. I loved him still and I’d loved him instantly, from the very first night that I met him when I was ten. He wasn’t like any of the men my mother dated in the years after she divorced my father. Most of those men had lasted only a few weeks, each scared off, I quickly understood, by the fact that allying himself with my mother meant also allying himself with me, Karen, and Leif. But Eddie loved all four of us from the start. He worked at an auto parts factory at the time, though he was a carpenter by trade. He had soft blue eyes and a sharp German nose and brown hair that he kept in a ponytail that draped halfway down his back. The first night I met him, he came for dinner at Tree Loft, the apartment complex where we lived. It was the third such apartment complex we’d lived in since my parents’ divorce. All of the apartment buildings were located within a half-mile radius of one another in Chaska, a town about an hour outside of Minneapolis. We moved whenever my mom could find a cheaper place. When Eddie arrived, my mother was still making dinner, so he played with Karen, Leif, and me out on the little patch of grass in front of our building. He chased us and caught us and held us upside down and shook us to see if any coins would fall from our pockets; if they did, he would take them from the grass and run, and we would run after him, shrieking with a particular joy that had been denied us all of our lives because we’d never been loved right by a man. He tickled us and watched as we performed dance routines and cartwheels. He taught us whimsical songs and complicated hand jives. He stole our noses and ears and then showed them to us with his thumb tucked between his fingers, eventually giving them back while we laughed. By the time my mother called us in to dinner, I was so besotted with him that I’d lost my appetite.