100 Letters About Love

Dear Wilder,

Since I started you have grown so much. It is hard to believe….almost impossible really. When I began I thought this might be a place for you to remember some day all the ways there are to call on the world in times of uncertainty.

It is still a dangerous, unknown, precarious world.

I am still me. Loving you more than ever. Worried about the world that you are growing into. So excited to watch you become in an ever changing dynamic way.

I wonder what you imagine our love story to be like. One of the magic parts of growing with you is watching as you form and develop relationships with other people, animals, place, and ways of being. Thank you for the reminder of all the resources that are here.

I can’t wait to get to know you more my fierce, sweet, smart, and courageous girl.

With all the love always,

Mama

Dear Someone,

At the beginning of this project, I thought this might be a project about being able to write a love letter to anyone. And that in that there was a way to feel, see, know what love looks like in unlikely situations.

Yet…when I sat down to write to presidents, judges, news anchors, I froze and realized that what this exploration really called for was a deep exploration of other sources of love.

And a call for those being seen and named.

And you someone…might also be part of this but I don’t know what to call you yet. You who feel like there is a named that needs to be called. Called out. Held. Known.

And that some kinds of explorations, maybe especially ones about love might be lonelier than you think. More fish out of water.

More testing the water.

I want to name you more than I can but I think that the act of love here is in understanding that I am unsure how to write that fierce letter that both calls out what hurts and is wrong and holds that love.

Maybe you can help.

With love,
C

Dear Intimacy,

I think some of my most intimate moments have been alone. Or what we call alone. There were many non-humans with me…

Like the moment of getting in the cold river for the first time that year and slowly, languidly warming up on a rock afterwards.

Or the feeling of driving home way too late at night with a car full of sleeping people and the closeness of stars, chatting and pulsing.

It’s a funny thing…to feel into the moments of intimacy. There is a melding, a melting maybe is more the truth. Things soften and sharpen at the same time. Maybe in intimacy the longing stops for just a moment and instead there is a togetherness.

It’s so amazing because it is easy to see and so slippery to feel. I think that somehow that wholeness and roundness is the kind of love that keeps things working, like a gravity that allows for all things.

Love,

C

Dear Traveling,

Sometimes I think I know you better than anyone else. I know how to be somewhere that is not known. I know the unstable nature of your ways. I crave the newness and the need to navigate and learn. 

You are fast and unexpected.

Beautiful.

Too wild. Lonely. 

Delicious.

I miss the way you feel on my skin as I feel uncomfortable in a new place. I want that.

You make me tender in a way that allows love to come easily. 

-C

Dear Kelli,

I thought about you hard the other day. Maybe it was the middle of the night. Maybe it was one of those fleeting parts of the day in between a long, never-ending seeming list of things that maintain living.

But I was thinking about colors, and your incredible drawings with so many fine lines.

And how you have a magic. And how the world seems like it is a complicated place for you. And how you seem so much like you are looking for home.

And I wonder what that will be for you?

I suppose I was also thinking about how once for a moment in our lives it was so easy to love one another. For me there was something intoxicating in a wild friendship of excess. And then just as quickly as night-blooming flower it was gone….not painfully, but almost as if it never existed.

What a phenomenon. Maybe that is what a romance is. And what’s funny is that the vibrancy of sharing feels more real rather than less.

I wonder what you remember. I wonder if it is fond and soft like mine or if you remember more the awkwardness of our last times together. Maybe you remember my boring arrogance or the strange impossibility of our conversation. 

I hope that I will have more of these friendships that feel like meteors and that when they burn out I think of you and the sweet bright ride we shared.

With love,

C

Dear Ritual,

I keep trying to write you in the form of the ways I find you. My early morning coffee. The quiet things I do to calm my mind as I fall asleep. The questions I ask when I hold a place for listening. Even the return to these letters as a place to enact something real and imagined. Known and unknown.

Invited, invoked….

For me, I can’t remember a time I didn’t know you or find you very important. That is a funny thing in a family and time where certain traditions held weight but the daily act of practice and cultivating knowing was not seen.

I began and still do many of my rituals in the private of a quiet room or in the dark away from other people.

There is space there. I wonder what it would be like to invite others into this relationship you and I have.

Is there room in our magic together for more?

With love,

C

Dear Butter,

If there was a day you needed a love letter it would be today. It is a beautiful Spring day. Yesterday you went hiking and the wildflowers seeped up through the bright green grass making it looked like there were springs of color emerging from the meadow floor. And the world is miraculous and you know how to see that.

And it is not so easy or clear how to be you in this world. It is a time of linear thinking. You can find soft spots and rest there.

They are there.

Now, here you are doing experiments with vulnerability, love, belonging, and imagining.

Which is the work of invoking memory, presence, and imagining.

It is a kind of inhabiting, that you feel so hungry for.

Thank you.

With love,

Chelsea

Dear Invisibility,

I talked about you a lot today and remembered how magic and lovely you can be. And how hard it is to know you so well. Is that a thing that women know how to love and wield? 

As I talked about you I realized how slippery you are and the ways that I see you as hard and dangerous, and forget how beautiful you can make things. That is what it is like to shift shapes and you know how to do that perfectly.

What was it like to be you in other moments? Were there times when you were a celebrated trait? Maybe there are places…I can certainly think of some and the way those places make me feel whole is amazing.

Thank you dear companion.

With love,

Chelsea

Dear Night-blooming Jasmine,

You call me back to myself. And with you it is always springtime, the kind of springtime that lives in the middle of the night after you have danced to hard.

You talk to the eucalyptus after rains. And the soft warm of pine needles in late summer.

Smells of home in world that is not all for humans.

Thank you for that invitation.

Love,

Chelsea

Dear Deena,

As I think about what it would be like to live in the same town as you I have feelings. I remember what it felt like to be in the wilderness with you. You have a magic, a silliness, a sweetness.

I remember what it felt like to me when we stopped being friends and how my heart hurt. How it was to unknow you. And wonder why unknowing had to happen rather something else. I think it had something to do with location, space in our lives, or what it meant to need someone.

Now a number of years later I know from the internet that you have a small child. A girl, very close to age to my own sweet one. I imagine that she makes your heart burst with love in ways that feel so old and so new. And I wonder what that will mean for us, as once friends, soon to be co-inhabitants of a town and world that is pulled by the gentle gravity of young children.

What will there love bring to something we shared? I can’t say that it makes entirely comfortable to think about it but I am curious. Are you?

With love,

Chelsea

Hi Molly,

It’s so nice to hear your voice and imagine you over the ocean in your life. I find you soothing and also it is just so nice to remember that you and so many other of these important people are out there in the world. Making. Dreaming. Disrupting a world that is defined by only literal ways. Thank you. 

That is sweet and poignant for me today. It reminds me to be a little softer and kinder in it. And if that is not a showy enough act of love then that is okay too.

With love,

C

Dear Pacific Coast,

You are the edge of the world. Powerful, wild, beautiful, dangerous. I almost gasp for air when I think about your jaggedness.

You make me feel small and enveloped. I love it. I always wanted to be part of something so big and with you I am over and over again. This winter when an enormous storm hit while I tried to sleep perched on one of your cliffs wedged in between a baby and a man to keep me safe, I thought, you might swallow us like you have with countless others. We might slide into that icy cold rocky mess that is shoreline in a storm. 

And each wave hit. The house shuddered. I shuddered.

The wind might have even shuddered.

But not you, you in your amazing capacity know that even when there is all the banging, crashing, breaking, and foam, you are there.

Big and small. 

Big and small. 

Big and small.

Again.

I love how you hold me.

-Chelsea

Dear Rhythm,

I want you most of all in the studio these days. Just a soft quiet drumbeat that lets me return to the place of making. Your cadence is amazing…and I feel most together with you when I get so, so quiet and there is space for me to notice.

Lots of times I feel you with the insects first, and the construction, and then the birds. The enveloping drone of wings on a day when the sun is out can feel so comfortable, almost like a pulse inside my own body.

I know that I am lonely for you when I stop being able to hear. And when I say hear, it is more like a felt sense rather than a noise.

I thought I was writing to you about the way it feels to fall into making but I am not, I am writing to you about the way you offer a tangible place to put longing that always changes.

What an incredible magic….

Love,

Chelsea

Dear Ben, Robin, and Stella,

I am thinking about you today and how much I enjoy the easy way it is to be with you in the world. What a great gift.

With love,

Chelsea

Dear In-between,

Its nighttime which is definitely the time of in-betweenness. The day is over except for the fumey, nervous bits that at the end. I settle down in so many ways and then you show up with all the maybes, could bes, and what ifs.

I think if I saw you the right way I might be able to see your magic. The way you make me feel soft and open to all the ways life might turn. You have a lot of power and so much of it allows for incredible creativity. I think the part that is scary is how vulnerable is the unknowing..there is a slipper quality to being liminal.

And now as I try to recognize you it’s almost funny because you keep shifting shape into what I hope is a more tangibly known thing. But liminality isn’t here or there and that invitation that you bring is a kind one. A request to inhabit.

Thank you for being a mist.

Clouds are so hard to catch.

Even for meteorologists.

With love,

Chelsea

Dear Saideh,

Your music was just what I needed last week. I have been meaning to write you ever since and I am so happy to be sitting down to do it.

In our world and in our group of brilliant thinkers I am hungry for experiences that land me in my body and touch my heart and spirit. And the soft drone of the shruti box and all of our voices did that. It was concise, powerful, and transporting. Everyday since I have been thinking about it…how do I invite that into my everyday? Will you teach me? How do I learn to listen to music like that?

I can think of other moments either dancing or just listening to music that have pulled me out of this reality and into a reality with more vibrancy and depth.

I was curious, could we begin a dialogue or something about learning to notice. Would you be interested in that? I think that the ability to notice, feel, touch, listen seems at the center of the act of love.

Awaiting your thoughts!

With love, 

Chelsea

Dear Mari, Ada, Simon, and Button,

I can’t believe we are learning to be new families together in this moment. It feels like to most natural and unimaginable thing possible. It feels to me like now more than other moments in my life it is so important to know that you are there thinking and growing in some of the same ways.

How do we hold these tiny incredible creatures in this precarious world? What does loving themthe way that is right for the instability, anxiety, and fear that is so present look like? Did people always feel like this when they held their babies in the middle of the night? I am not sure. But I am sure that we need your help in imagining how to do this.

It’s hard now between us and definitely part of what is hard in that for me is the beautiful moments of clarity that I have between not enough sleep and too many things to juggle. I wonder what it is you need in this in order to feel safe, held, known.

For me I think that is a dynamic tension where we see each other as different, becoming, colored with love. 

With love,

Chelsea

Dear Calpine House,

Oh childhood home, I thought about you so much for many years. You were built by my parents. The sun slid it’s way slowly across the floor each morning warming up the tiles one by one. Outside a crescent of granite boulders was the place to play or hide. And maybe more than other things the big woodstove where my dad accidentally burned a hundred dollar bill alongside all the other scraps of paper in his pocket when we were particularly broke. And the late night battles between skunks and raccoons on the deck in front of the sliding glass doors.

When we all moved out I went back with Megan and we smoked cigarettes inside, poured a case of hard-won non-alchoholic beer on the carpet. We made mud puddles inside, we ground them in, with that soft, soft black dirt behind the house. And that was our goodbye to a childhood home, I think we may have been heartbroken 13 year olds, but who can really tell?

Now, I think about you though and wonder if you miss us, and if the wasps still live in the bathroom wall, and if the pipes still freeze in the winter, and if you will hold some other lives with the generosity that you held ours?

With love,

Chelsea

Dear Love,

When I think about love I think about growing with you. And how at this moment much like another one twelve years ago, so much is being upended. In the world and in our lives things are very different than they recently were. We are the stewards of a tiny, fierce, loving, magic child and our nation is being led by a real-estate magnate who looks, smells, and feels like fascist leaders of the past. Right after we met each other I remember you coming to my house after a night protest against the invasion of Iraq. President Bush was about to come into office for the second time. We sat in my bed and cried for all the suffering we knew was coming. 

And from then to now we grew and grew and grew together. Supporting the incredible resilience and agility of farmers fighting to feed their families. Encouraging the strength of the voices of our researcher turned collaborators as they grew from quiet moody teenagers to strong proud indigenous leaders. Making culture by committing over and over to holding a world where we keep discovering the power of imagination, intuition, commitment, and joy.

Somehow, this moment I don’t feel like crying. I feel ready to work with you.

And love letters in this moment are part of that work. They are a reminder that there is so much here already.

So much that you are a part of. So much that has grown, been made, and has inherent potential.

It’s a funny thing to write you a public letter after having written you so many private love letters. I feel vulnerable in it. A little exposed.

And I love you.

-C

Dear Tzucacab,

Ordinary in your ordinariness. Really if we are being honest, a shitty town in the middle of the jungle. Unspectacular in many ways. You have opened up and share so much magic with me. There is so much generosity and knowing in your pitted streets. In more than a few of those slightly crooked houses are great acts of love.

It is towns like you that make me remember how to love a world. I grew up in a town like that and it was an invitation into curiosity.

What wonder….

Love,

Chelsea

Dear Kitchens,

Warm place in the house where I find myself pulled too.

I want to move my hands there, finding the rhythm of how to be and how to remember with other people.

A practice in returning to now. A felt sense. 

Sensate. Temperatures. Flavors. Imagined ways of moving.

With love,

Chelsea

Dear Quiet in the middle of the night when the moon is full,

I can’t really believe the world could be that slow and potent at the same time. Heavy lidded moon, too pregnant with possibility. Languid, slow, and illuminating.

You hold us in a magic of homecoming. 

We belong to you and you belong to yourself.

And late spring snows.

You are too lovely.

-C

Dear Laine,

Seeing you with your Bernie is the best thing. He is all the animals in one, wild, silly, rascally, sweet, thoughtful, and hungry. It’s amazing to be part of your world of animals and cupcakes.

There is this magic part of you that I think about a lot which is what a world would be like if people were more unapologetically themselves. There might be more standoffs with grumpy nurses in waiting rooms over sticky buns. And more tulips in mailboxes to resolve disputes with postmasters. It makes me curious to think about how we could all navigate the world a little closer to our own compasses.

You remind me of that.

Love,
C

Dear Homesickness,

I saw you the other day on her face from a crappy hotel room at the bottom of the middle of a trip that is too long, too taxing, too far. You are a slippery one and a great one. You hurt in the pit of the stomach and heart at the same time.

Because with you, home becomes a real place.

With vibrant smells, colors, and ways to be.

The conversations fill you up.

And the power doesn’t go out and you don’t get annoyed with your neighbors.

The eucalyptus and fog meet in just the right way to welcome you.

Love,

C

Dear Patti,

I think you are brave. And love especially in a world that can’t figure out where poetry fits needs courage. Your kind of bravery feels so mundane and I think that might be the hardest kind. What do you think it is?

Do you see yourself as brave? 

Love,

C

Dear Ti Kwan Yin,

I always imagine you as some kind of soft metal that doesn’t exist in this world. Iron Goddess of Mercy. Compassion. These are the parts of everyday love. They are the mechanics of learning and re-learning. 

Somehow these things matter don’t they? They are the stuff of how we do this together right?

With love,

-Chelsea

Dear Electorate,

I don’t know how to hold you in love without holding you and me accountable in this thing. I think each day as the atrocities of this administration unfold I can’t help but wonder where does that leave us. How does that leave us with each other? How do hold one another? And call each other out? How do we become whole again with and without each other? What is it to imagine a love that could hold our differences?

-Chelsea

Dear Man with the twins,

I saw you holding your twins and my heart hurt so much. I have no idea how to write a letter about love for you today when the unfathomable has happened. I have no idea.

So, here it is. I see you. I see you are in anguish. Here on the other side of the world, my heart aches and I hope there are ways to heal.

With love,

Chelsea

Dear Sarah,

Happy to have you back. It’s a funny thing this life with people coming and going. Sometimes it feels like there is a lot more going than coming.

I am wondering for you as you set off on this new adventure what it might feel like to be you. And to love you. How do know how to love yourself in a whole new place? A whole new life in so many ways?

I ask that with real curiosity as I feel my way into my own newness.

With love,

Chelsea

Dear Spring,

I love your tempestuous self and how there is no avoiding your unexpected nature. You are so luscious, especially this year. 

With love,

Chelsea

Dear Katie,

When I was a teenager I needed somewhere to be. Thanks for letting me be. I am not really quite sure how to acknowledge or name that kind of love. But if I were to try I guess it would be to thank you for that kind of knowing that some moments are harder than we know while they are going on, maybe for knowing that adults and teenagers are not the same thing, maybe it is for drives with Phil Collins and the smell of sweet coffee and Indian blankets in the back seat.

With love,

C

Dear Afternoon,

It’s still cold. And it feels like it has been gray forever. The people at the table next to me keep making overly loud jokes to each other. I am looking for something to love about you and then I remember that it is a soft, holding kind of gray outside. Zack, a regular with something to say to everyone showed up. There are two teeth in my baby’s new world that she uses with a kind of voraciousness.

I think that might be a love letter for today.

Love,

Chelsea

Dear Rock’n’roll,

A love letter to you recognizes the times you may have saved my life. There was your energy when the reality and confusion of strange adolescence was too much. You made room for all the people to be their weird, beautiful, queer, awkward selves. 

Love always to you.

C

Dear Cat,

There are so many things I don’t understand about where we stand. I have thought about it a lot. I wonder if you have.

I suppose I wanted to write today because it is a sort of acknowledgement of change in friendship and how to hold that in love. I imagine holding that knowing of shared closeness with dearness, fondness, and confusion.

I hope your life is full of love.

-C

Dear SR,

What do you think it’s like to write a love letter to a place of refuge? I start thinking about all the places of refuge in the world that I have felt and known. I start imagining a map with the light points touching each other with soft almost invisible threads between them.

And then I remember that there is also refuge here and now. In this moment. In this body. With this degree of presence and awareness.

But it’s funny…because the refuge you have offered me is such a different one than other places. It doesn’t fit right exactly. I always have a little itch for something else. And yet it is just right that place and it does remind me of so many other unexpected places of refuge.

I love that reminder.

And the languid sway of the grass in the spring.

And the sweet snake who lives by the kitchen.

The over eager deer

I love the quiet dark of the mornings

and the way people find their homes in even a few days of quiet

how taste returns

how its okay to be and be and be.

With love,

C

Dear Mia,

Sweet girl with a contagious laugh. You and your bright spark of a spirit are such a good part of being.

Thanks for being part of it with me.

Yours with love,

C

Dear Margaret,

In your worlds things are so terrifyingly close to what we already live in. I can help but feel like this is an ode of love to the beauty and strangeness of this world. Is it?

Love,

C

Dear Ganges,

Last week you became a person along with two other rivers. In a mythic sense maybe this is actually a step down from being a goddess to being a person. I am not sure. But I am curious in your new role with all the rights included…what does it feel like to be a river and a person at the same time?

Does it feel hopeful? Do you imagine a future of being loved and recognized for the majestic being that you are? 

I think of you at dawn and dusk being loved fervently with flowers and ghee lamps. I think of your water smoothly reminding us of our short time next to your long time.

I can’t help but think of you as a person and a river, and I would guess that it is a limitation of my human imagination that makes me think that.

I still love you.

-Chelsea

Dear Victoria,

This magical year of changing into being a mother has me thinking a lot about you. It has me thinking about how mothering and creating are such acts of love. And I wonder what this is like for you. 

I feel so surprised by it.

The way those two things fit neatly in one another almost asking for each other to exist.

I guess I say that because I thought maybe loving a child and love a practice might exist at odds to each other and maybe they will. But the imperative for having a creative life seems magnified in it’s importance by the addition of this child.

Because it feels so dangerously literal out there in the world these days. I wonder what you think?

Love,
C

Dear Rain,

As I start to write this my eyes blur over a little bit in the hopes that relaxing them will conserve a bit more energy to sit hear and listen to the sweet noise that you bring to the day. It is the first day of Spring, a little warm, and I am so grateful for the softness that you have brought to these last few months. I am so tired today as my girl grows her teeth and you remind me today as you have many days these past few months to be soft too.

It feels like in the time of this new president and world it feels easy to forget you and how you have arrived for such a long time. And how much personality you have, you bring a force that sometimes is so caring and gentle like today, and other times washes away whole mountains, towns, and civilizations.

I wonder how do we love you back in your time, on your terms, dear rain. How do we continue to notice you and foster your place in us?

With love,
C

Dear Day of Burearcracy, Uncertainty, and Tiredness,

How can I find ways to love you even when it is hard? The soft light this morning as I woke up. The way the grocery checker and I softly recognize each other. The dog sneaking into the front seat of the car time after time so he can stair into my eyes. You have so many lovable moments if I think about it.

-C 

Dear Alix,

How lovely to see you yesterday for a meal and a walk.  It’s so nice to see you and be reminded of all the ways a life can be creative. Also, yesterday you talked about the loneliness of being your age and I thought about that a lot on the way home. 

I was thinking about loneliness as I sat and waited for everyone to arrive to lunch and how many times in my life I had wished for a big group of people to sit and eat with on Sunday afternoon. And how grateful I am for them when they show up. I can’t really imagine your stage of life right now living with your daughter and granddaughter after having a partner of so many years. Yesterday when you talked about Fritz you said you were used to each others faces and I thought about that familiarity of so many years between the two of you. I can only imagine living and being with someone for such a long time must in certain ways be similar to getting to know yourself.

What is it like to spend a life with someone? And now what is it like to live with his paintings all around you?

I am wondering these things.

With love,

Dear Melody,

Yesterday I was thinking about you as we picked out ranunculus in the sunshine. It was really because I was reminded about how many parts of the world are easy to love with a deliberate act of being present. You are so skilled at that and I really love to get to be in that exploration with you.

It’s a funny thing that act of noticing and presence because while I think so much about it is easy, it feels difficult. How do you cultivate that kind of presence? Do you find that some things make it easier?

With love,

C

Dear Protest Cakes,

Thanks for making the resistance a little sweeter, lighter, and connected. I love your way in the world.

Love,

C

Dear Marisa,

Brave sweet girl. I was just thinking about you and wondering what is going on in your life right now. And now I know a bit more. I sort of can’t believe you are real…navigating all that you do with such humor and grace. It’s such a strange moment in the world right now and I can’t help but imagine what it might be like if people moved through adversity with the same sort of ability that you do. I wonder what our world would look like then.

So, maybe you can tell me, how do you do it? What is your secret to act with so much love? 

With so much love and amazement,

C

Dear Future Russian River,

I can’t wait for the day when your water runs clean all year long. When August comes you will be cold, sweet, and easy to jump in. You will be free of nitrogen run-offs, broken bottles, and old car parts.

Looking forward to our moments together.

With love,

C

Dear Wilder,

You make me smile so much every day. I love you and your undeniable enthusiasm for the world. Thank you thank you thank you for being such a sweet light.

Love,

Mama

Dear Moon,

What a miracle that you come back every month. Your return really is a kind of love. Knowing that you show up is a kind of anchor for me to remember that all of our scurrying is not the whole story, and that kind of love matters. 

It matters in that way that gets hard to imagine. It is slippery around the edges and almost unreal which I think as you must know well from so many repetitions of an always changing trip makes each orbit new.

This time when you were big in the sky I was awake in the middle of the night staring at you with a very young human who was crying, farting, laughing, and ogling you. You are beautiful and we both decided to remind each other how much we love you.

Love,

C

Dear Amanda,

I have started a letter to you a number of times now but then I decide to think about it somewhere before I get the words going. Today is the day for it. I am wondering how you got so curious. And if in that curiosity you have cultivated a way to move through the world with love. I ask because so many times I am really struck by how you investigate something. There is a part of it that feels so interested in so many things both the real and the possible through imagining.

More soon.

With love,
C

Dear Joey,

It’s funny for me to write this so close to the time that I wrote a letter to my black and white dog but so be it. I started thinking about all of these relationships of love that we are witness to and what an incredible, sometimes complicated, and often very touching part of life that is. One of those for me is the bond between you and that sweet dog. It is so sweet to see something like this develop outside of the bounds of my own relationship with either of you.

Do you think that is one of our great abilities as humans to find sympathetic joy in other beings experiences of the world? I know that for me it is a great rudder in terms of orienting myself in the world to see people with their people.

With love,

C

Dear Jeanette,

What a beautiful thing to have these new girls in our lives. I can’t believe how lucky we are. And what a thing to get to share with you too. I think so much these days about how we make the world for these small beings. And right now we are so much of their world. That is changing as they grow and explore for themselves. I wonder how we will show them that we love them in 10 or 20 years. I think somehow it will grow and deepen as they become but really I can’t imagine because it seems so hard to believe that I could love more.

I wonder that feels like for you.

With love,

C

Dear Keith,

Thank you for being inspired, brave, and tireless. It means everything to keep making.

Love,
C

Dear Janice and Cecil,

Thanks for making a place that feels like home for me in a city that continues to whirl and change around it. I am surprised to find myself writing this letter this late in the project because when I think about phenomenal acts of love I think of Glide. I think of it’s duration. I think of the daily practice of showing up for people. I think of loving as a continual act of mindful presence with a community full of changing needs.

And I think of how it feels to be held in that room on a Sunday with the choir. And the huge mix of people present. It feels like so many things. Many of them very imperfect and how I when I think about it that really feels a place where love is known.

That has been so important to me to know that.

With love,

C

Dear Myles,

There is something to the simple act of getting people together in the same place. What an unimaginable act of love your life was in bringing together so much power in community over and over again to create moments of unity against so many odds. I wonder what you would think of this moment and how to pull together people in a time where each of our boxes is being carved our so distinctly.

Do you think that acts of faith have a place in creating beloved community? I use that phase beloved community and immediately what comes to my head is Glide Memorial Baptist Church in San Francisco. The range of that congregation is staggering….and the ways that people come together there are something like I imagine Highlander. There is a sense of finding a way home that stands out.

Was this part of the intention?

With love,

C 

Dear Ta-Nehisi,

When you wrote a book length essay to your son about being a black boy and then man I could help but think about what a love letter it was. A love letter to sweet bright light of boy growing into manhood in a complex, dangerous, and violent world. And a love letter to the greater world about how we continue to learn to love (or not) our people through the actions of everyday life big and small. I say this because to me as a white woman with a small child that imperative that love is active, an action, a movement, a call away from comfort, complacency, complicitness shows itself in different ways.

Thank you for the reminder.

With love,

C

Dear Aurora,

Hello magic island dweller. I loved seeing your adventures to India recently. If there was ever a place to make you believe in love I think it is there right? I have been thinking a lot about you on that island carving out a life for yourself as I do that here in a closer place that is also far enough away most of the time. Why do you think it matters to go to or live in places that ignite that feeling of love in us?

With love,
C

Dear Rebecca, 

Your way of wandering through the world has this under lying current of deep curiosity. I was interested to know if you thought about your curiosity as an act of love for the world. And then how does that move from an interaction with the world to writing.

Is writing an archive of that process? Or is writing a way to make known the ways you are thinking through a world?

With love,

C 

Dear Zorro,

You sweet creature. My sweet sensitive dog. Your wild antics make me remember what a beautiful world it is and that needing to go outside and be in it.

I love you polka dotted dog.

-C

Dear John and Josie,

Thank you for making magic every summer for so many. Rivers, singing, and trips to the beach.

So much love to you.

Chelsea

Dear Medi-cal Office,

I am not really sure how to write a letter about love to you but let’s start with what I imagine you could be.

I think that the idea of something like a public department established to care for poor people, old people, women and children might have hours that reflect times when one could actually get there.

You would call us to make sure that things were working instead of us calling you when there was a problem. And the music on hold would just be quiet but not hang up on you.

Something about it would feel less criminal to try and navigate healthcare for families rather than squeezing into badly fitting criteria.

-Chelsea

Dear Kathy and Holly,

Thank you for seeing us when we needed to be seen. We needed some neighbors who could make us feel at home and you were them. 

With love,

C

Dear Charlie,

I hope you are skiing right now in this spring snow. I am sitting in my warm studio with a cup of tea feeling a little scattered. It’s so funny how much the addition of this new girl has made to make me think about family. And how much I really don’t know and do know.

I was thinking about a conversation we had once about asking for help and what that feels like to both of us. For me it is so hard. I want so much to be held somewhere in a place that feels okay to ask for help but really it is so wobbly when it comes down to it. What do you think?

I guess my hope is that through thinking about these things day after day I find some places to lean into things. One of those hopes for me is realizing that it is a lot more possible to see things with a bit more space around them. You are so good at that. In your life in the mountains it seems like there are a lot of moments of touching down and loving what is. I so admire that in you. Maybe you can help me find some more of that.

With love,

C

Dear Valerie,

Are you still dancing your way through the day with the help of many children? I never really asked when we were together about how that came to be.

I think if you had been a teacher at my school it would have been a little more easy to survive. This morning I woke up and thought about the poet in residence at my very small very conservative very rural school. He came once, I think I must have been in first grade.  He performed his poetry something about a snake in grass, greens, lots of alliteration.

It is stuck in my head as one of those moments where I felt alive. I realized there might be other people who understood what it felt like to imagine so ferociously and to be so sensitive the strong sensations of living in a world.

And that is also my memory of coming and watching your classroom and then getting to be a part of it. There was this sense of presence. Joy. Exploration. And deep engagement.

Thank you. With love and movement,

C

Dear Lucy,

How does a critic be an advocate, a lover of place, someone who has a known position?

I think in this there is a great act of kindness. And maybe it has something to do with this idea of sympathetic joy. Because it feels like there is something other than an act of ownership in approaching criticism this way.

I guess I say this because I think beginning to critique as if it matters is fundamentally a different way of imagining how our collective fate exists.

Love,

C

Dear Lara,

When I last saw you we talked about the way space is held to bring babies into the world. I in my tender space with my tiny child felt in wonder of the fierceness that it takes to be at that transition over and over.

And those tender days before and after….thank you. What an enormous act of love. And this kind of love is an act of bravery. Last night I was reading Bell Hooks and her book, All About Love, she talks about agency in this way that startled and kind of scared me. She talked about the way children are often seen as property and yet are told that this uneven relationship is one of love.

I think that growing a child is the beginning of this relationship. You and the way you hold this is about this kind of becoming. With a place and the resilience to start to be in this complex world.

With love,

C

Dear Emily,

I don’t actually know you and only know a tiny bit of the seed of the idea you are sharing but I thought it might be a great place to start a dialogue. When you thought about people doing the same thing all over the world, noticing the ebb and flow of the moon, it felt very kindred to me. 

This idea of a practice of our tensile strength in community. Places to touch down and make real what our hopes are for creating beloved community. Noticing how the natural world interacts and is an integral part of what that is.

I am so interested (sparked by this daily writing on love) about what these gestures are that are real and symbolic at the same time. This, Bright Power, seems like one of them. It seems to me like a query into being as an act of knowing the world. Something in this feels so right. Can we find a time to talk about this? I’d love to know what you are thinking.

With love,
C

Dear Marvin,

I hope that next week we sit down together and spend some time thinking through a love invocation together to call in what is needed for these letters. In that spirit (couldn’t resist) I want to think a bit with the help of knowing that we’ll sit down soon.

What do you think an invocation is? This summer I saw you read a poem at a dinner and I was struck by when you do that…it feels like other people come. It was full and ample, rich with spices like the meal. Who are these ghosts? How do you pick them? How did you start? Where do start now? Why do think an invocation is a powerful thing? Is it always with words for you?

One of my lonelinesses in doing this project, maybe in thinking through this, feeling through this is the way the world favors antisepticness. There is a preference or maybe a strong bias for conclusiveness, neatly buttoned up, an avoidance of the messy.

I think in times like these and really in most times for most people there are these other things that linger in our hearts, bodies, and spirits. They need. 

And somehow those are the things that feel to me like how you start to write love letters to the world. How you untangle or retangle the places we find ourselves. And they feel. And they smell. They are tactile, tangible, living, breathing, being born and fading away.

I am not sure what a love invocation is exactly but I have a sense that it is something other than what usually happens in plain sight, except it happens all the time unseen….

Is this a place to start talking about invoking love? We’ll see I guess.

Love to you,
C

Dear Maia,

We just got a letter from you in the mail and I am as usual touched and humbled by the way you are in the world. Your deep curiousity, intellect, creaitvity, and sense of humor are there strongly, fiercely even in these unimaginable moments.

I am thinking about you today as I delight in the sweet songs, wild rolls, and first teeth of this new girl. Who knew there was love like this? What happened in your life when your darling Z was born? I’d like to know the story. 

With so much love,

C

Dear Jamie,

Here is a love wish for your speedy recovery. I hope you will be running, jumping, and dancing soon.

Love,

C

Dear Thich,

I wonder what you think about these times. What is like to be recovering from a stroke? What is it like to see cycles repeat themselves?

Recently I have been reading Fragrant Palm Leaves and have been thinking so much about how that book feels likes like a love letter to place and people in the midst of conflict. And how that to me seems like so much of your working, thinking, and being is that.

What is that practice now? What does it mean to be with these things and act out of deep-rooted love? How do we care for one another and ourselves? How do we feel at home?

As I write this I think about the idea of engaged mindfulness. Something about the felt sense of wholeness is in a sense a touching down in moments. It has a kind of clarity, maybe those are moments of love?

I wonder…

Love to you and wishes for your health.

-C

Dear Corita,

I would be hard pressed to write love letters everyday without thinking about you. You are the queen of the everyday practice. You are an efervescent reminder that the doing matters. The everyday matters. And the practice matters.

And for me these rules that you offer are in their own right a love letter that I refer to so often. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

RULE ONE: Find a place you trust, and then try trusting it for awhile.

RULE TWO: General duties of a student — pull everything out of your teacher; pull everything out of your fellow students.

RULE THREE: General duties of a teacher — pull everything out of your students.

RULE FOUR: Consider everything an experiment.

RULE FIVE: Be self-disciplined — this means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

RULE SIX: Nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail, there’s only make.

RULE SEVEN: The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all of the time who eventually catch on to things.

RULE EIGHT: Don’t try to create and analyze at the same time. They’re different processes.

RULE NINE: Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.

RULE TEN: We’re breaking all the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.

With these reminders of all the ways to engage there is so much access to loving as a practice. It feels tangible and actual to begin and continue with the force that love is in our collective and individual lives. Everyday right? On and on right? 

With love

C

Dear Dad,

When I hold you in my mind you are on a sailboat and it is an October afternoon. You are happy and steering the boat full from a lunch caught when we stopped to swim. You are outside of the world of tickets, money, passports, running a business, or hold so many threads. It’s warm. There is a light breeze. Life is full of adventure. It’s funny, unexpected, real, and full of unlikely characters and places. A love letter to you feels like a thank you note for offering me such curiosity and enthusiasm for exploring the world. I don’t exactly know where to start it. Thank you for letting me share your adventures and for showing me how many ways the world can be.

I remember hearing you talk about growing up in the suburbs and how you needed to get out and see the world. It’s funny because I can’t really imagine not knowing how big, diverse, and complex the world is. I think in large part that is because of traveling with you.

There are so many moments for me that stand out in our travels where my conceptions of the world were completely changed in an instant. Many are funny like the smell of body odor and expensive perfume as I was squeezed into huge breasts in a crushing hug of Mary Gogosi after she gave me a bottle of champagne for my 11th birthday. Or singing in Nepali and hiking farther than I could have ever imagined my 7 year old legs would take me with what to me seemed like the most kind, capable, strong, gentle men in the world in the mountains of Nepal. And then experiencing pain, discomfort, or watching other people in incredibly difficult situations really opened up my world to the misery of poverty, inequality, and injustice. 

I am thinking about these things so much these days as this tiny girl learns to move and each day is filled with incredible exploration of her world. And how strange and precarious this moment in the world feels with our country being led by a dangerous mentally unstable crook. I somehow think that now more than ever it is important to be out in the world with my new sweet daughter letting her (and me) be with the wide-range of human experiences. Thank you for them…

With love,
C

Dear Aaron,

I have been thinking about your tea performance as I write these letters day after day. When I came to your performance a few years ago I was struck with what an act of vulnerability and love it is. We have talked some about what it is like to hold that space over and over again for different groups. What is it like for you?

What does it feel like to open up some other space that so directly upends the realities of conflict and instead sits squarely in the discomfort and generosity of sharing a world under extremely complex circumstances?

One of the challenges and exciting points of friction in this practice has been thinking about and feeling what a symbolic and literal act of resistance are in relationship to each other. I think, as we have talked about some that one of the shortcomings of many activist based things is a short-sightedness to who and what people actually bring to things when they bring their whole selves. 

Do you think maybe the tea performance is a pause in this? A step away from always creating and accomplishing objectives. Or I don’t know, do you think we need this sometimes?

I sure think I need that in order to carry on and act out of love rather than all the things can and do cloud but I am not sure what the role of it is in larger individual or collective life.

With love,

C

Dear Anna,

It has been so interesting to think about all the different angles of approach to an exploration of love. One that keeps coming up and feels fairly intimidating to write about is this idea of meeting points and in a way the friction they cause.

I guess I think about this because in so many ways investigating love is like chasing a specter. It slips out of the shape you think it will be as soon as you get close enough to think you know what it is. With that in mind, what does it look like as you begin to trace these dynamic changing conditions of our world? How do you hold the paradox and complexity? What happens when you start to really like one story about how it is and then you discover it is something totally different than what you thought?

With love,

C

Dear Cassie,

It felt like maybe this was the way to write you and think through a love invocation in a way. I wonder what the common ground is when a friendship is new or once-new. And what are the conditions that hold love while working through conflict that arises.

I have a slow heart. 

It is slow both ways…it takes a long time to hold things close, to trust, to be it’s soft self. It needs patience, coaxing, and the work of showing up over time.

And it needs dynamism. It is not a heart that does well in relation to others untended.

To me it feels like there is a rhythm right now to resolution. It is one where the parties hold one another in their highest esteem and are able to listen. And in that space there are places where trust is felt not expected. It is practiced. In real ways. In real times. 

I got to see like I did before that for me there is much about who you are in the world that inspires me. I love your bravery, creativity, and willingness to take risk. And there is also a lot about you that I don’t know which slows me down as asking you to be someone who I hold close. That is still there for me and I sense it is for you too. 

And I am so glad you asked to clear the air because it made me feel into that.

I hope your new life in your new land is full of love.

-Chelsea

Dear Rosi,

I can’t believe that you decided to learn to read as an adult. Or that you where that startlingly white huipil in the red dirt of the garden. Or that you know all the trees, plants, and concoctions to make one feel better. 

Sometimes when D talks about you he starts to really talk about how brave you are. He is right. Thank you for loving your place to fiercely and stubbornly.

And thank you for all the times you have fed me and reminded me that it’s a complicated world.

With love,

C

Dear Elizabeth, 

You are coming to visit the new configuration of our family this week. I am thinking a lot about the shapes of families in these past days with addition of this new person who feels like she has always been and who is also so new to this world. 

It feels a lot to me recently like families and cycles of love are like celestial bodies with their own timing, gravitational pull, and lives that we participate in as individuals but don’t steer. We are subject the push and pull of these suns, black holes, moons, and other planets. I guess I say this because this magic man, who is your son, and I have been orbiting around each other for some time now and as we incorporate this new brilliant being into our solar system I am suddenly so much more aware of all the other bodies and the brilliance that they bring.

This has me thinking about you because the slide into motherhood is an orbit I never imagined exactly. It is so intimate and unimaginable in so many ways.

And I wonder what it has been like for you.

What was it to become the steward of these two boys in a complicated world?

What is it like now as they have grown and so has your family?

What was it like to share the experience of this kind of love with your family?

Right now the small one is asleep on the bed. And I wonder every time what she is dreaming about…in our tightly wound orbit of now I dream about her and I think based on the way she reaches out to make sure we are touching over and over in the night she might be dreaming about me. I think about how as she grows she will have more of her own gravity with less and less of me in it. And our love will have to grow and change to hold that.

What a thing, like the rest of it, I can hardly even imagine.

With love

C

Dear Frangel,

Are you still taking care of a huge ranch in the middle of the jungle all by yourself most nights? Do you still sleep with that ancient rifle right by your bed? Is Junior the dog still alive keeping your company?

Are you still magic with animals?

Is your son still in jail?

Did your daughter have her baby?

Is everyone getting enough to eat? We miss you and your cuentas espantosas over here. We can’t wait to see you and have you meet our regalo.

With love,

Chelsea

Dear Alex,

We just got off the phone with you. Afterwards we took a bath, sang songs, laughed some, and remembered how much we all miss you. As I write these letters I have been thinking about you and your time in Africa. And your big smile. And how you got so sick and how I thought about you so much during that time. And how I’d like to think about you that much now.

It was so easy to remember how to tell you and remind you how many people love you when it feels like an emergency and somehow it is so much harder in the everyday.

Why do you think this is? What do you think helps us remember? I have this sense as I think through love as a practice that the ways we do it all the time matter.

And this makes me feel a little queasy to write because it feels so trite. And maybe it just is but I think somehow, this has to do with Africa and helicopters and big hospitals and jams, that the cultivation of these places of strength matter. In fact I know they do because there is some kind of tensile strength that is light, agile, and flexible in them that doesn’t just exist in one body in one place.

What do you think?

With so much love,

C

Dear Lizzy,

I just read this beautiful piece of writing about the arctic that was about a love of a place that was disappearing and the changing nature of a damaged relationship between a brother and a sister. It made me squirm to read because it felt so public but then I thought about the power of being seen in these things and I thought I’d give it a shot to think through some of the pain I feel with our love.

And how we see it as a practice.

Part of our lives.

Practiced.

Known…

And of course because the project is about love it brings up the places in my life where it feels hurt or squeezed somehow. I think that is a great gift of engaging with the felt sense and the idea over and over. Day after day thinking about how it changes, has it’s own rhythm, needs itself to know itself. 

So…in the case of the love that we share and hold together I have thought a lot about how I just don’t really know you that well. I think there is some kind of held expectation that being related, being sisters means we know each other well. But really you were quite small when we stopped living together, and I was almost ten years older but really not so old either. Since then we have shared our lives in the context of our parents houses during special occasions, breaks from school, and family trips. And I wonder in this situation what does it look like to love each other? Do you know? Do you feel like you know me?

What do you think that it means that our lives and our bodies are related but we just may not know each other well either by choice or by circumstance of life?

In this situation, this container, what do you think we should do to hold each other when our lives do touch through family occasions that will undoubtedly be happy and sad?

I guess for me part of this is a hope that there is trust. And a place to touch back to. 

I think that I can love without these things and I have no doubt that you can too but it might support a freer place of love and understanding. What do you need to love someone? What does a conversation about love founded in necessity but hopefully not obligation look like? Can we have one?

With so much love,

Chelsea

Dear Pam,

The studio is full of flowers this morning and on the drive here I kept interrupting the conversation to make sure to point out the flowering quince, the magnolia trees in bloom, the soft silvery acacia trees. What a beautiful, vibrant world we are a part of. Thank you for giving me the excuse to engage with it in another way.

With love,

C

Dear Chelsea,

Thank you for being brave over and over again.

With love,

C

Dear Bamuthi,

I don’t think weaponizing love offers what we need. Can we sit down and talk about this? I think that love like gravity has its own force that exists with and with out us. Like gravity, the power is dispersed but undoubtedly there. We know it because it keeps us alive. 

But how it keeps alive is a different story and maybe that is what can talk about. Maybe we can talk about the way it burns at different moments or settles just right to fill in all the holes. Or when we like that gaps are bigger than the power of what love can bring.

Or maybe we are talking about the love of action, of bravery, of intimate presence with the reality of moments. I think weaponizing love robs it of the vast power that it has. Do you think when we talk about love we are talking about power?

With love,
C

Dear Grace,

I wonder what you would think of this moment. I keep thinking about your words and how I think so often of your push for activists to “use our imaginations in new ways.”

What does it mean to show up like that for a lifetime like you did? How do you mark progress? What is it like to fight with love? What parts do hope and creativity play in a moment like now when it feels like there is a decayed center in our country?

With love,

Chelsea

Dear Mom,

This is likely only the beginning of a letter because it is going to take me more days than just this one to write to you about love. Right now I am sitting here in the rain, I just left my new sweet daughter and her papa to take some time to think. It is so good to have a few moments to myself but the strangest part is that I miss them even in the shortest times right now.

I wanted to know what you think your first love was. Was it running? Mountains? Singing with your family? How did you know it? What does it feel like to remember it? I am curious about this for a few reasons. First, I think you are person who lives much more in their body than I do and I have been thinking about you as a child and wondering what that was like for you?

How did you explore moving? Did it always feel like a big part of you or was it a discovery over time? Does it still bring the same kind of joy? What does that feel like over time? I am curious how that has followed you in different times in your life. I have so many more questions but they are not quite formed yet. I’ll continue when they get clearer.

So much love,

C

Dear Yoko,

What is the instruction for love right now?

Yours,

C

Dear Jill,

Something happened, I’m not sure what and you stopped returning my communications. I tried every so often for a number of years but it didn’t work to reach you. So I am not sure if you knew or not but you loved me at just the right time in the just the right way and I wanted to say thank you.

Thank you for helping me stay in that flat in the middle of all the huge cemeteries in Kensington with beautiful tile. Thank you for spending time with me in Paris and inviting me into your incredible world of Surrealists, thinkers, and friends from the Paris Commune. It made me feel whole and remember that the world was there before with people imagining and resisting and loving each other so fiercely.

And also for loving me in the complex situation of your family and the fierceness of your love for each other in caring for each other and Amy in the best ways you knew how. 

As I write this though, I think about how we met with you as my teacher assigning us to map our neighborhood as we lived in London. It’s funny for me to think about this as I write these letters which I think are in their own way a map of resistance. A reminder of how many ways there are to land in the world. In this map about love, the spirit of resistance and imagination tensile strength is in the multitude of ways that so many of you have navigated these overlapping, overarching, overdone systems of oppression.

I think likely if this correspondence were to reach you, which I certainly will try to ensure it does, you would help me find the right balance of poetics, humor, and grit to respond to this moment of rising hate and fear. 

So maybe with that in mind a few questions for you, how have people mapped their ways of love despite these increasing systemic crackdowns before? Who do you turn to in big ways and small as your country and the world is increasingly polarized? What is the role of playing in these times? Are you finding it? 

Here is hoping that you are as full of love and jokes as I remember.

With love,
C

Dear Toddywinkers,

What an incredible mind and spirit that drove your curiosity for the world. I can only imagine the next world you are in is so happy you are there with your enthusiasm for gardens, plants, birds, blueberries, weaving, folk-dancing, and being outside.

I feel so lucky to have known you. I think that sometimes we meet people at just the right moment in our lives and you are certainly one of those people. When we met I was 24 and you were 92, I think had we met a moment sooner you would have been too fast for me.

I have been thinking about you as we hurtle into life with this megalomaniacal new president. What would you say about him? I imagine you sitting in your chair outraged at the deplorable things he says and does. 

In writing this something stands out to me about the way your love felt and was shown in the world. You noticed so many things with so much accuracy. Also, your curiosity and enthusiasm for many parts of life, reminded me of what it feels like to be enamored. What is this as a practice? How does one for so many years continue to find things that fascinate them in the world? I am so curious, did you have a set of practices that helped support this? What kept you going with them? Receptive? 

Is this a part of loving over time? Does it mean coming back to things you know and don’t know with attention, enthusiasm, and grace?

If you get this message let me know by way of the quince tree or blueberry muffins, ok?

With love,

C

Dear Robin,

Your love story feels to me like it is about time. Knowing that stories of love, belonging, and change exist in this moment with this unbelievable set of conditions and all that came before is different than just reacting to now.

For whatever reason, I think about two things when trying to understand your fierce love that I’d love to know more about. The first one is how sweetgrass for sale is not the same as sweetgrass collected and used for ceremony in relationship with where it came from. This feels like the heart of something important.

The second is your description of the Thanksgiving address and your children. This feels so powerful to me to begin with the place of known connection and belonging. Right now, in this bifurcated dangerous high stakes moment it feels so much easier to see all the ways people, places, and other beings don’t belong together. Or maybe what I really mean is how they touch each other. It is lighter and more agile but just as strong.

I wanted to talk to you action and love over time. I am interested in what action means to you. Especially in regards to resistance and love. When thinking on the timeframe of a a river, or a people, or a place what does it mean to engage in acts of resistance over a lifetime and what is the rhythm of this? How do you imagine time intersecting with love? Are they both two forces like gravity with their own force that intersect sometimes or is it something else?

And what does it look like to act out of love in a moment like this one? Plagued with so much disparity of wealth and maniacal leaders? 

With love,

Chelsea

Dear Norman,

I am sure in Zen there is way to greet you that befits the way one greets abbots but I don’t know it so, dear, will have to suffice. Most nights recently I fall asleep doing some version of tonglen that you taught me a few years ago. It is the one where I breath in the suffering as the thick, sludgy, tar-like thing that it is and watch it transform as I bring it close inside and breath out light green mist, the soft kind that happens just before dawn in so many parts of this world.

This feels integrally part of a love story for a world that I worry so much about. Especially this very special moment of new life that I am sharing with my baby feels like a lot in a world like this. And I wonder when you think about love and the world what it is to you. Does a great love propel you forward and do these things we do to see, hold, understandsuffering help? I guess when I say a great love I mean an applied love of now and now and now.

With love,

Chelsea

Dear Annie,

When I think about you I think about the way oak trees and pine needles smell late in the afternoon just after it starts to get cool. I think about the hard slippery granite canyons and those big boulders strewn haphazardly like marbles in the middle of that water. The clearest, brightest water. Snow melt from those mountains that made us. Do you think our mothers knew how much those mountains would be a part of us when they carried us in their bodies?

It’s raining here today as I sit writing. It’s verdant outside. The magnolias are defiantly pink. But I have been thinking about the feeling of the mountains and that love of solace. Do you remember the first time you felt it? Do you feel it when you are writing? Fishing? Coaxing vegetable and flowers out of long neglected backyards? 

How do we do this thing of living and resisting and carry that solace with us? I am so curious how do you practice that? 

With love,

C

Dear Terry,

It makes me nervous to write you a letter about love but when I think about loving place as a practice you are one of the people who I touch back in with. My friend and I are were talking about you a few days ago as we wander through the magnolias at the botanical garden. Did you always knew you loved place? And did you love writing first? Or are they linked together in some way?

And what about bravery? How is bravery involved with love? Your mother sounds like a very brave person, do you think she taught you how to be brave? What happens if we aren’t brave?

Does figuring out to belong to a place and having place belong to you have to do with loving it? What about paradox in these places and people that we love? How can we hold them in our hearts even when it hurts or makes us angry?

I think that so much of your writing is advocacy for places and connection to wildness. Something that keeps coming up for me as I write these letters is an investigation into how people practice love through out their lives. And are those practices in your case for the public or do they live more in the realm of the day to day? What is the imperative to learn to do that if you?

With love,

C

Dear Megan,

I think you are my oldest friend in the world. I was thinking about our funny small town, the sweet yellow dogs that kept us company, and what it is to know someone over a long time. And how we learn to love each other in these different moments in our lives.

And the rhythm of knowing and not knowing with each other’s world. What do you think that will be like as time continues? Do you think we’ll continue to learn each other and find ways to be in each others lives? I have thought a lot about this being friends over time thing recently because I realized that I imagine friends folding into a fabric of life for a whole life and like a weaving some moments are more punctuated by their presence and some they recede more in the background.

I wonder in this moment what it is like to hold each other dear even while I don’t really know what happens in your day to day. Let’s think about this together ok?

With so much love,

C

Dear Arundhati,

Were you born knowing you were fierce or did it grow in you? This morning at my house the sun came up as it does in the winter with it’s pink and orange streaks. I sat on the floor with my coffee as the room turned from that exquisite early morning citrusy glow to a full blown day and thought about how lucky India is to have you born in this moment with all of the paradox.

Do you love paradox? Do you love India? When you write about place, how do you hold all the contradictions without having them spill out all at once. Do you make great lists of how all the things touch each other? 

I remember reading some time in something you wrote that people always ask you when you will write another story like you did with the God of Small Things, I think you are in your essays. To me they feel like the truest kind of stories. They are the kind of story where forest dwelling armies and big businesses meet on muddy roads and find they are facing cousins from the next town over. Right now in this moment of the early days of the Trump presidency as part of my research into love as an applied practice, I feel like I need those stories so much. They are the ones that are steeped unevenly in history that make contemporary moments real like they are.

What does it feel like to tell these stories? How is to be fierce and unpopular for it? What do the people who love you tell you to encourage you to keep writing?

I also hope that sometime you tell another story like you did in the God of Small Things because the moments of the internal worlds feel like they don’t always have room in writing that aims straight for the jugular. What do you think about this? What is the place for this kind of storytelling in a world that needs so much?

My place that I circle back around to is California and while it is very different from India, I hear in your writing a sense of longing or maybe it is belonging to a place that is us and asks to much of us. This place that is California is a deeply precarious one and I hope to learn from people like you how to write about it with the complexity of the love that I feel for it without sidestepping the contradictions.

In this slippery letter, I mean to say that I think love is a practice. And as a practice it is real, complex, full of paradox, so messy. Thank you for being in the mess with love.

Love,

Chelsea

Dear Farnaz,

It’s a cold morning here and the fog is hugging the ground like it only does in these months where the ground doesn’t quite warm up. I am not sure I have ever tried to write a love letter to a poet. In fact like artists, I don’t exactly know what it means to be a poet. And I feel full of questions about what it means to explore the poetics of something.

Your poems seem to me like they are about love. The love of place, moments, and a life. A life that is full of imperfect shapes that can’t help but be noticed somehow. And I wonder how you started writing and noticing? Or if you started noticing first and then writing?

What is it like to practice writing over a life? What does it do for you?

When I think about poetry in a flat way, it is beautiful but with the help of greeting cards and graduation speeches it starts to slip into sentimental and slides around in there. I struggle with it’s potency there yet sometimes it sticks and the ways that it matters is different, more permeating than other ways of writing.

Do you know why this is? What happens in the poetics of something? Is poetry a way of learning how to love in public? For me somehow these letters are part of me learning how to do that and it feels terrifying. What will I do wrong in the process of learning to share this strong, fierce feeling? What happens if I don’t learn how? What happens if we all forget how to love each other privately and publicly? What happens if we forget how to be brave?

It seems like then now more than other times maybe we need poets so badly.

We need them to write things that touch some of us sometimes. Maybe we even need them to make us mad, lonely, or whatever else…but I think that something tells me that in this strange apocalyptic time we need to feel.

And I feel so worried that in feeling it will only be seen as sentimental when really love as I see it or have felt it means the things that we do matter. Like you, teaching, writing, growing tomatoes, and living a life in a way that pulls it’s own weight. I am not sure what I mean by that but maybe you will know and we can think about that more together.

I hope that this morning you might be writing too and drinking great coffee.

With love,

Chelsea

John,

I am thinking of you today in your crooked little house in Berkeley that felt like it never left the 1970’s. You are drinking coffee in a ceramic mug that is also a little crooked and you are smiling and talking with a huge stack of newspapers next to you.

You are full of words of encouragement. Real encouragement not the carefully doled out kind that professors offer in an office on campus above the whir of central heating. You are talking about being dropped off in the backcountry in Alaska by a plane with your daughter and her husband, enough food for three weeks, and your beloved camera. You look alive even as the cancer threatens you.

I wonder how many people you cheered on and why year after year you did that. I wonder how you knew how to love group after group of students. And how you saw the seeds of potential in them. I wonder what you thought of the change that those people made and how you held them and them stepped away.

Thanks for the fierceness and love.

-C

Dear Mary,

I am thinking of you in your cabin in the woods. I am thinking of the river rocks that make up the fire place and the soft sounds of the screened porch. 

I am thinking about how much I love you and what an incredible person you have been. The way you love those Appalachian mountains makes me feel at home. It’s almost like I remember something that didn’t ever happen. And I keep thinking about how I never asked you how started loving the mountains.

Were you little? Did your family take you there? Or was it on weekends with JP and the kids? When you joined the trail club what was it like? 

Thanks for making me feel at home.

Love

Chelsea

My dear sweet girl, 

You are the reason this all feels so important. In this moment in the world as you are just arriving there is a lot of upheaval. The future feels very uncertain and as you begin to smile, talk, and interact with this big world I am reminded of how precarious it all feels. And I am also reminded of the fierceness of love that you bring and have invited in. So maybe this letter is a thank you note to you for helping me remember all the people, ways, and moments of incredible bravery, grace, and tenacity that love is.  

I hope that these letters will be a web for you invisible, visible, strong, and flexible that help you know how to find love in people in a complex world. 

There is love. There are people who love you. I am one of them but I won’t always be the right one. And you will and can find love in so many ways. 

Last night the love you needed was a strong hug and warm body that feeds you and keeps you safe. And sometimes the love you need will be the body, spirit, voice, energy, or being of your papa, your grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, lovers, rivers, mountains, oceans, or maybe it will be someone who inspires you that you don’t know but their lives and fierceness hold you. You will need them in their wisdom, strength, beauty, humility, and humor. 

And they will need you my tiny ferocious girl with all of your presence, intelligence, caring, and magic. 

It is something like a research project to re-find that community that is needed so badly right now. The community of people who have come before and the ones like you who are coming up. And the ones who right now are imagining, working, dreaming, and holding a multiplicity of ways for the strength of love to be held.

Understanding love is like balancing on a rock when you are crossing water. It requires agility, movement, balance, strength, and vision. For me so many times it has also meant reaching out to someone who is willing to catch me on the other side. And by writing these letters I am stretching into that place. I am remembering the resilience that is already there.

Thank you for all your love. I love you more than the moon and the stars.

Yours forever and always,

Mama