Love unbound

We Alone by Alice Walker

We alone can devalue gold

by not caring if it falls or rises

in the marketplace.

Feathers, shells

and sea-shaped stones

are all as rare.


This could be our revolution:

to love what is plentiful

as much as

what’s scarce.

Michael and the kids are in Seattle visiting with family, which is bittersweet for me. Sad that I’m not making our yearly pilgrimage to the PNW, and sweet that I have the healing quiet of a home retreat to myself accompanied by focused catch ups with friends, books, a beer to indulge, writing and a bit of yoga stretching. I am alone, and I am not lonely.

At times, even when the house is bustling full and the circles of connection are starkly clear, I am aware of alone-ness. Only I know what it feels to be in this body that is quite different than the body my soul inhabited just six months before. Only I can articulate what I need and only I can release my emotions. Only I can…

And yet, like Alice Walker’s poem above, having faith is knowing the “Only I can” is stubbornly bound to “We alone…” This is God’s (in whatever way we understand God) gift to humanity — a covenantal quest to discover meaning and purpose, to have others surrounding us so that we can draw out hope when all seems scarce and lost.

This truth serves a greater good too, as we feel morally compelled to act and evolve–to realize that there is a plentitude of spiritual resources from which to navigate our personal and public brokenness. Jewish mystics referred to God as Ein Sof, Without End, Boundless, Infinite. In her own way, Jewish poet Emma Lazarus captured this mystical sense in her collection By the Waters of Babylon:

“…When the emancipating springtide breathes wholesome, quickening airs, when the Sun of Love shines out with cordial fires, lo, the Soul of Israel bursts her cobweb sheath, and flies forth attired in the winged beauty of immortality.”

Lazarus knew, years later Walker knew, and we too discover through our lives, that there is a Love without bounds, enduring through cobweb rubble and searing sun, urging us on, and filling our voice with an immortal melody. Feathers, shells and sea-shaped stones, the earth joins in my/your/our chorus.