Love's Work

"The Lovers must leave a distance, a boundary, for love: then they approach and retire so they love may suspire. This may be the economics of eros; but it may also be taken as the infinite passion of faith: Dieu se revele en se retirer. Love and philosophy may seem to have had the most to say, but friendship and faith have been framing and encroaching by night and by day."

- Gillian Rose, Love's Work: A Reckoning with Life

I will need to re-read this book again, if only to understand it a little better than I have the first time reading it. But to me this book puts forward - in the face of the hardest things, atrocities, sickness, death - a praxis of love that is wise in its humility, strong in its flexibility. When love can learn, reflect, adapt, seek, let go - when its has muscles, heart, and brain - in other words, when love is living enough to work: this is love that makes our human experience achieve its best form.

What stories show this kind of love? Do you recommend a novel, film, or memoir that shows this working love? One story that comes to my mind is Places in Heart, by Robert Benton. The story is so much about the transformation within the characters' capacities for love. Modes of love at first formed by brittleness, prejudice, and fear start to soften, share, see, and 'flesh out' so that by the end love is operative, and real.

Sarah, Plain and Tall

I didn't read one of my favorite children's novels as a child; I read it when I was twenty. I had just spent my first year overseas: my brain was teeming with images and ideas and plans. Back home in Texas, I joined my family on a road trip to Montana, to mark out a little of the Lewis and Clark trail from our hired minivan. I had the soundtrack to Almost Famous in my transportable CD-player, and the wide vistas of last frontier out the windows. That's when I read the novel Sarah, Plain and Tall.

After all the theology and philosophy and literature I had read that past year (all really good stuff, igniting deep fires in the brain), Sarah, Plain, and Tall arrived like a goldfinch, at first - gold, bright, melodic. Then, it went deeper. The story settled within me, like ballast.

The story is a healing one, a story about trust and love, told in simple terms and kind words.

With Sarah, Plain and Tall on one side - Simon and Garfunkel's "America" in my ears - and the long spread of green, mellow pastures with rising mountains in the distance on my other side: I started writing The River Boy. It was in an old school spiral. I wrote double-spaced, the thick line of empty paper between each line of words, markings in pencil.

Good stories alight. Great stories settle in. They change us, help us. And sometimes, they even compel us to see etchings of another story - a new one, our own. Characters never seen before ask to come closer. Props like quilts and stones and rivers are suddenly at hand, eager to be used. The cadence of words sound out along the lines of what hopes to be a good story . . . 

Eggs for Dinner

Some of my favorite passages in any book are descriptions about the food! Mary and Colin and Dickon ate scones and cream in their secret garden; Anne's children ate grilled fish and potatoes from the fire in their Rainbow Valley; Laura and her family made a small meal of cornmeal and molasses by the side of their wagon. What's a meal that you would write about?

A Nook of One's Own

Our townhouse is a bit cramped for space, and I was running out of bookshelves. I was also feeling the lack of a quiet corner to read. So, with a bit of brainstorming and elbow grease, my family and I worked together to transform that space beneath the stairs (which was a heap of bikes and wetsuits) into an inviting, cozy, serviceable nook. 

Like how the smell of salt-air or the caw of seagulls takes your mind to the seas, just walking by makes me wonder what's next in the book I'm reading . . . and writing . . . 

Where do you like to read?