Green Thoughts: A Mindfulness Community

I remember a close friend laughing when she found me looking up the word love in the dictionary. I was in my early 20s and had been dating someone for a few months. I wasn’t sure about him. After listening to my concerns, my friend wisely advised that if I had to look it up, it probably wasn’t love.

love : an intense feeling of deep affection

I went on to date that person for 8 years. We travelled the world together, supporting one another through a time of enormous growth, but I knew all along that my friend was right. We were like mismatched puzzle pieces squashed together by sheer force of will. We just didn’t enjoy one another that much. 

Meanwhile, the memory of my friend and her advice gives me that warm feeling to this day. It’s so strange that ‘an intense feeling of deep affection’ can almost go unnoticed when it shows up in a place you weren’t taught to look for it. I wish I’d recognized sooner that my closest friendships gave me so much of what I needed to know about loving and being loved.

Despite a couple more decades of experience, my questions about love persist. Right now I’m especially interested in how to teach my son about love. I hope he knows the joy of loving the natural world, his own body and the particularities of other people. In my search for inspiration, I’ve been listening to the audiobook ‘See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love’ by Sikh activist Valerie Kaur. I find myself returning again and again to her idea that the foundation of love is wonder. When we get curious about life, we open up to the possibility of finding affection, interest and pleasure in unexpected places. 

The idea that love is not just a feeling, but an intentional practice of curiosity and attention to detail, is a valuable lesson I hope to pass onto my son. So for now, I’ll ask him, what phase of the moon do you like the most? What do you think your teacher likes to do on the weekend? Is there a sound that makes you feel peaceful? What did you find out about the world, about yourself? And all the other questions he won’t find answers to in the dictionary. 

Artwork by my kiddo… a little window into what he pays attention to