love is enough

On the expansive nature of the human heart, plus, muffins!

Mar 01, 2025

I saw a beautiful quote yesterday. I don’t remember who said it(and couldn’t even find it again on the Internet), but it went something like, “If you don’t think love is enough, you aren’t thinking about love the right way.”

We talk a lot about love. Love as unconditional(which, in my opinion, is an overused and abused framework to think about love - often used as an excuse to exploit care rather than just to say, “yes, I’ll be here as long as we both treat each other with the respect foundational to our love”). Love as warm, as fuzzy, as joyful.

Love as the thing you should have with your family; love as the only thing that matters to a relationship(another overrated one).

I think we limit love in how we talk about where it shows up. And by limiting love, as if one could do such a thing, I mean we limit the possibility of how it comes to us.

We speak of love in terms of romance. We speak of love in terms of family. And we speak of love as this force that must triumph, this feeling.

Love is not a feeling. It’s a verb. It’s a choice.

And it exists everywhere. Not in a few relationships which society has decided are the most important, central ones to our lives. It exists with friends, with strangers, with plants, with the whole Earth.

Love is the word we use for the parts of the human experience we don’t know how to describe.

Love is the feeling you get…

watching a sunrise
listening to a beautiful melody
watching your dog breathe
seeing the tree leaves rustle in the wind
screaming in anguish trying to comprehend the death of a loved one
watching someone struggle and wishing you could do something, but being so powerless

Love is everything. It’s the feelings we can’t put into words. It’s the moment we stop and realize we are so lucky to be living this life. And love is not some soft emotion. Love is an experience with teeth. It takes grit and courage. It requires one to look at things as they are, eyes wide open, and allow the heart to break, yet again, all the while knowing that nothing is wrong with you. This is simply what it means to be alive. This is what it means to love.

Love is saying, “this, too.” This belongs here, too. There is room for this experience, this emotion, too.

Why did I wake up today and choose to chat with you about love, dear reader?

The honest truth is I have a larger piece in the works that I’m trying to pull together about the experience my generation is having not only in this moment, but over the course of their lives.

To break it down — most of us were brought up to believe we were super special, and then sent out into a workforce that had a diminishing need for workers and paid people less, leaving us to fight each other like the animals in Mean Girls for a raise, a word of recognition, or decent working hours.

I’m trying to synthesize a lot of perspectives in a way that is actually enjoyable to read, so in the meantime, I wanted to share with you what’s been bringing me joy recently.

At a meeting of the Women’s Fund here in my hometown recently, one of the ways I try to make an impact locally to feel like I’m impacting anything at all, the group opened the meeting with that question:

What is bringing you joy?

“My husband is coming home today,” I shared at the time. “I’m very fixated on that as I’ve been a single dog parent to two since Sunday.”

But there have been other things this past week, and I thought you could all use a sprinkle of joy, and perhaps I could get some joy back from you.

So I sat down to write, on the heels of an ill-advised venture down the rabbit hole of social media, and my heart felt so expansive.

Expansive like, it is so heavy that I don’t know what America aligning itself with Russian interests means for the future and I’m trying to fend off feeling powerless, and expansive like, and in this same moment, I feel joy, sitting here, listening to music, watching the winter trees blow in the breeze, basking in the beauty of this present moment.

This, I thought, was love. Love for this life. Love for myself. Love for the world. To be able to hold it all.

So I wrote to you about love.

I think we forget that we can hold it all. That we can hold everything we are experiencing - anger, frustration, joy, powerlessness - with a compassionate, tender heart.

Rather than making what we feel wrong or trying to avoid the discomfort. Rather than getting stuck in the feelings.

I think Thich Nhat Hanh put it best in his poem, Please Call Me By My True Names, when it comes to how we can relate to others with an open heart, seeing their humanity despite what else we may see or be aware of.

I’ve linked the whole poem above, but here are some of my favorite bits:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Don’t say that I will depart tomorrow —
even today I am still arriving.

....

I still arrive, in order to laugh and to cry,
to fear and to hope.

The rhythm of my heart is the birth and death
of all that is alive.

...

Please call me by my true names,
so I can hear all my cries and my laughter at once,
so I can see that my joy and pain are one.

Please call me by my true names,
so I can wake up,
and so the door of my heart
can be left open,
the door of compassion.

So I can see that my joy and pain are one. That is love. That is how we leave the doors of our heart open to compassion.

—

Now, for what has brought me joy this week…

First, muffins! As I said, Reid was gone for a lot of the week, and his mom recently gave us an old cookbook of hers, out of which I scavenged several recipes, including one for muffins.

I used to bake a lot as a teenager, but unlike my college roommate, I couldn’t have made it into culinary school, and when I moved away from home I prioritized making the simplest of meals once I knew how to make them at all.

That same college roommate did teach me how to scramble eggs. Much was learned in college, even if it wasn’t all academic knowledge :p

So on Monday or Tuesday night, just me and the dogs and some free time, I set out to make muffins. And readers, it took about as long as the recipe book said it would but somehow was more of an ardous journey than I expected. However, it was still a joyful process - simply to immerse myself in doing something for fun.

I had thought about writing this to you that night, but I didn’t sit to eat dinner til 8, and by that time I had a little mantra: “Let today be about the muffins.”

My way of reminding myself that I did not, in fact, need to do it all.

Other things that have brought me great joy recently are the beautiful weather we’re having here this week. I’m hoping it’s the last of the true cold, but we’ll see. You never know in North Carolina.

Additionally, reading, walks with the dogs, watching spring emerge little by little(and it’s moving at quite a snail’s pace this year), my new heating pad, donuts, a beloved virtual writing group starting up again soon, chats with friends, and just, well, being.

Time to be, rather than to do, is always the most joyful thing of all these days.

I’d love to hear what’s bringing you joy, and for your viewing pleasure, I’ve assembled a little joy collage below from my life.