To Speak and Embrace

[The Stage is on Fire] is a page-turner in which, much like life, there are no easy answers and yet each step of the journey yields insight and hope. This work of heart must not be missed!

Melanie Faith

Creative Writing Teacher, Essayist & Poet.

Katie Steedly’s first-person piece [The Unspeakable Gift] is a riveting retelling of her participation in a National Institutes of Health study that aided her quest to come to grips with her life of living with a rare genetic disorder. Her writing is superb.

The Society of Professional Journalists

In recognition of receiving the Dateline Award for the Washingtonian Magazine essay, The Unspeakable Gift.

I thank you … It is the authenticity of your “class notes”; and it is the delicacy and skill with which you present the nuances of classroom life and the actuality of your students’ and fellow teachers’ lives.

Maxine Greene

Philosopher and Education Scholar

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The dream is awakened when thinking I love you and life begins when saying I love you, and joy moves like blood when embracing someone with love. – Mark Nepo

I want to write about love from the perspective of a woman who has never given birth.

I sometimes hear, “You don’t really know love until you give birth.” That presents a very narrow picture of love, in my opinion. Within this definition, love is reserved for a few, rather than something that anyone who is willing to risk and be vulnerable and be intimate can experience. Giving birth is a miraculous blessing. I don’t think it is the only miraculous blessing that allows us to truly love.

What Love Is

Love is life changing. I have felt that. Love is heart expanding. I have felt that. Love allows us to be seen. I have felt that. Knowing love is not limited to particular experiences, or definitions, or rules. In fact, true love is bigger than all that. If everyone who gives birth knows love, then everyone who has given birth would be loving. That is not the case. If only one definition of love exists, then all the ways in which we experience love in our lives would not be possible. That is not the case. If the rules of love are only written in a book or preached from a pulpit, rather than felt in the deepest corners of our hearts and lived in the actions of our days, then everyone who follows those rules of love would be loving. That is not the case.

What I am suggesting is that life begins again and again and again when we allow ourselves to love.

Cupid’s arrow. Puppies and rainbows. Toddlers at Christmas. Holding hands at sunset. Caring for someone when they are sick. All those kinds of love and more. That is the true blessing and challenge of love. Just as giving birth is welcoming new life in a profoundly sacred way, so is falling in love, building and sustaining friendships over time, being part of a family, embracing someone with deep care and compassion, reaching out in conversation. Life begins and begins and begins there, too. Knowing love happens there, too.

https://kitt.global/may-11-to-speak-and-embrace-mark-nepo-the-book-of-awakening/