'Love is an action, not just a feeling'
Dear friends,
In these next few entries, I dip into the realm of personal stories, exploring a question posed by one of my storytelling teachers, Sue Hollingsworth. She asks: how can we share our own personal stories in such a way that, like the ancient myths, they travel the world from person to person, offered as a gift?
Recently, I was inspired to take up this question by an exquisite 2017 thought piece and conversation between bell hooks and Thich Nhat Hanh - two luminaries to have lately departed this world. Their shared enquiry was: ‘How do we build a community of love?’
Introducing the piece, hooks writes of her long and enduring inquiry into the ‘place and meaning of love in our lives and culture’ - reflected in her book all about love: new visions.
The psychoanalyst M. Scott Peck1, she explains, defines love as ‘the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth’. This was her favourite definition of love - and now, upon reflection, I think it is possibly mine, too.
Love, in my understanding of this definition, is an offering, always reaching out. It is an action, as hooks says, not just a feeling. It is vulnerable, courageous and sometimes fierce and challenging, pressing you to stretch yourself and change. It can last a lifetime, or be encapsulated in brief moments and transient spaces. As reflected in this quotation that a friend recently shared with me from Brene Brown’s book Dare to Lead. The quote is directed toward teachers, but really it is a call to all of us:
‘We must be guardians of a space that allows students to breathe and be curious and explore the world and be who they are without suffocation. They deserve one place where they can rumble with vulnerability and their hearts can exhale. And what I know from the research is that we should never underestimate the benefit of a child having a place to belong - even one - where they can take off their armor. It can and often does change the trajectory of their life.’
Listening to this quotation pulled me right back into a story from my own life, nearly twenty years ago. It was an experience that expanded my own understanding of love. I was a young journalist, and I had travelled to Ethiopia with a photographer friend to work on a story of young women injured during childbirth.
As we flew over vast stretches of arid, impossibly steep mountainous terrain to reach a small town in Tigray, northern Ethiopia, I tried to imagine the life of a young woman living in one of those sparse clusters of dwellings I could see far below, perched precariously on the mountainside, with hardly another human-made structure visible in any direction. I had read somewhere, in preparation for this trip, that many rural Ethiopians lived more than a day’s walk from the nearest clinic. Now I could believe it.
We landed in the town of Shire (pronounced Shee-rae), about 50 kilometers from the Eritrean border. All around us were signs of the war that had ended several years earlier: crumpled army tanks and rusted artillery abandoned on road-sides; soldiers and military checkpoints2.
A nurse in the town had opened her doors to us, and we were to spend a week gathering young women’s stories from local hospitals and clinics. Our hostess ushered us into her parlour, carrying a toddler on her hip. We sank into the threadbare sofas, gratefully receiving mugs of freshly brewed, pungent Ethiopian coffee. Just then, a knock sounded at the door, and our hostess went to answer, leaving us to our fatigue in the darkened room.
After some time, the door swung open, and a man with a weary posture and deep furrows around his eyes stepped into the room. He was cradling a blanket gathered up into a round bundle, which he silently placed in my arms. Then he turned and left the room, only to appear a moment later with another similarly shaped bundle, which he handed to my friend.
The bundle felt like a pile of feathers on my lap. Instinctively, I began to gently peel back the folds of the scratchy woolen blanket, a breathless feeling of anticipation gathering in my chest.
At last, I saw the face of a tiny, wrinkled newborn baby. He was weak and shrivelled, his eyes were shut, his mouth was open and his face contorted. He was crying, except that hardly any sound came out, just a weak kind of rasping.
A few moments later, the nurse appeared with a third baby. She got straight to work, washing bottles, heating formula, fetching blankets, while my friend and I did our best to follow her lead. Each of us took a baby on our lap and tried to bottle feed it.
I held the bottle to my little one’s tiny mouth, but he was too weak to latch onto it. I dribbled a small drop of the formula into his mouth and gently urged him to take it. I was gripped by a fierce and sudden tenderness for this tiny little life, clinging so tenaciously to life himself.
Only much later did we piece together a story of what may have happened. Somewhere in the mountains, a heavily pregnant woman had been walking on a deserted road. Perhaps she was seeking medical assistance. She had died on the road, giving birth to these babies. A fourth baby had also died. The man who had handed us the bundles in the parlour was a farmer who had found them all. He had bundled up the babies and walked for three days, carrying them here to Shire.
Somebody here in the town must have pointed him to the nurse’s house, for it was a well-known refuge for children. Living here was a Dutch nurse, brisk, funny and unsentimental, assisted by two local young women and a young man who was always so kind and gentle with the children, and had lost his family in the war.
Children were always coming and going. Two little girls, both orphans around aged 2, had predated our arrival. Another day or two after we arrived, a family from a far away village brought two more young children, a boy and a girl both about six to eight years old, to stay for a month while their village endured its season of hunger - the food reserves were depleted but the new harvest had not yet ripened.
In the days that followed, my night-time worries about the three babies subsided. Every morning I saw them looking a little stronger and more robust. They were steadily putting on weight. The day before my friend and I were to depart, the three babies would be going to the orphanage in the regional capital, Mekelle, along with the two little girls.
By day, my friend and I would traverse the countryside and nearby towns, interviewing doctors and nurses, finding young women who had suffered childbirth injuries and speaking with them and their families. In the afternoons and evenings, we would return to the house and finish our work, play with the children and chat with our hosts over plates of injera and spicy cabbage.
One day, returning from the field I sat down at the desk in the room my friend and I were sharing to type up my notes. Such was my concentration that at first I didn’t really take in the noise emanating from some corner of the house. It was a mild disturbance hovering just at the edge of my awareness. But gradually I took notice that this noise disturbing me was in fact the crying of a small child.
I followed the sound to the courtyard, and there I found one of the two little orphan girls, sitting in the dirt by herself and wailing plaintively while the others played nearby. It was a tearless, tired sob that just seemed to say ‘somebody notice me.’
I scooped her up in my arms, murmuring: ‘what’s the matter, you? You just need a little bit of attention, a little bit of love, huh?’ Almost immediately, I could feel the pudgy little girl just relax into my arms. I could see things from the child’s perspective. She just needed to feel held and cared for and loved. She needed that space to anchor, and belong. Of course she did. We all do.
Later I saw pictures of her, from when she had arrived six months ago at that house as a sickly, malnourished little thing. I never found out where she had come from, or how she had ended up here. But over time, she had grown plump and pretty, with round little cheeks and fine, crinkly hair the colour of dark honey. But there was such an air of neediness about her. I could sense the others recoiling from her sad dark eyes and unsmiling little dimpled face. She was so vulnerable. So desperate. Those eyes haunted me and made me feel afraid for her future.
From that moment I picked her up in the courtyard, she became attached to me. I would appear, and her face would light up with a smile. She would run up and hurl herself towards me, smiling in my arms or clinging to my leg until I picked her up. I had never felt this kind of bond with a child before. As she became attached to me, I became attached to her. I knew she would be leaving soon for the orphanage. I couldn’t blame anyone for this, but it felt so unfair. I tried not to think about it, and instead to focus on giving her as much love and attention as I could over those next few days.
Finally it was the evening before her departure. I was exhausted after another day in the field. I went to the courtyard to find her before she would be put to bed. I picked her up, recoiling slightly at the trail of yellow snot running down her nose. Deftly, I whisked her into the bathroom and wiped the snot away. She was all smiles and happy gurgling. But I was fighting back tears, because I knew this was goodbye. I sat down and rocked her in my arms and whispered my blessing into her hair: ‘Be strong, beautiful child. I love you.’ Some time later, I found one of the young women of the house, and handed the groggy child over to her.
In the morning, they were gone. We had parted ways, most likely never to see one another again. Many times since then, I have thought of that little girl. Of the three babies and of that household offering a transient space of love, protection and care for children in their hour of need.
bell hooks and Thich Nhat Hahn, in their conversation introduced above, explore the idea of enacting love in community. As a cultural critic and prolific writer on themes of ending domination, violence and injustice ‘in whatever forms they appear,’ hooks had long studied the teachings of the Zen Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, whose messages of peace, compassion and engaged spirituality had once inspired Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, as previously mentioned.
The Vietnamese monk and poet explains:
‘In our own Buddhist sangha, community is the core of everything. The sangha is a community where there should be harmony and peace and understanding. That is something created by our daily life together. If love is there in the community, if we’ve been nourished by the harmony in the community, then we will never move away from love.’
Loosely defined as a group that lives together, shares some common identity, or a common purpose, the word ‘community’ comes from the Latin root word communis, or ‘common’. Thinking back today on my experience in Ethiopia 20 years ago, I am struck by the memory of what it felt like to - in a very brief and transient sense - participate in this community of adults extending ourselves, living with the purpose, of loving, protecting and caring for children.
There was the farmer who carried those babies to safety, the members of that household who looked after any child brought to their doorstep, and even, for a brief interval, my friend and myself.
I tell this story now as a gift offering. It strikes me that sometimes telling a story, too, can be an act of love. Extending ourselves to share what is genuine and true inside of ourselves, we can enact our love through the stories we tell.
And of course, our stories change over time, just as we do. I wouldn’t have told this story the same way 20 years ago, back when I was filled with wanderlust and journalistic ambition, and had hardly even begun to imagine the possibility of one day becoming a mother myself.
But I think of that little girl still, and hope that she still carries that memory of our bond somewhere inside of her. I hope it has helped to sustain her somehow through the hardships and difficulties she has faced, like a story from which one draws courage and strength. And I hope she has been held by many other loving, supportive hands on her life’s journey.
Through our offerings of love, and story, we have the possibility to create spaces of shared belonging - sometimes fleeting in the moment, yet also profound and enduring. It is difficult to say exactly how, or why - but I do believe that such encounters have the power, and the possibility, sometimes, to change the trajectories of our lives.
With love,
Megan
Building also on the work of Erich Fromm who conceives of love as the ‘active concern for the life and growth of that which we love.’
Tragically, Tigray is in conflict once more, with thousands dead and some 9 million people at least needing food relief https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-60169326
Beautiful once again, Megan! Thanks for sharing.