Weekly Wide-Awake: Great Love and Miracles

[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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Weekly Wide-Awake: Great Love and Miracles

Where there is great love, there are always miracles.
Willa Cather

Great love is a miracle. It can change the chemistry of our minds and bodies. It can heal wounds, new and old. It can build perfect bridges and deep connections. It can create justice and peace. It is always expansive, generous, and kind. It is magic in the way the sunrise and the tides are magic. It is magic in the way grace and light are magic. It is magic in the way that it is unrelenting like tempered steel, and beautiful like an iris blooming in the snow. That is the kind of love I am talking about. That is the kind of love I am praying about. That is the kind of love I am working toward with my heart and hands.

Miracles are the point of love. Let me explain. We love miracles into being. Being present to all that is is a miracle. Being still and knowing is a miracle. Gratitude for it all is a miracle. Imagining, building, and creating are miracles. The I am, as if, and the not yet are miracles. Every morning, noon, and night are miracles. In this way, love is the work of miracles. Not to diminish romantic love but to change love’s shape, capacity, and expectation to include a world of justice and peace. That is the absolute true miracle.

What I Have Learned

Love as the Practice of Freedom

Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination—imperialism, sexism, racism, classism.
bell hooks — Love as the Practice of Freedom

If we pay attention, it is easy to feel like love is lost. If we pay attention, it is easy to forget that to love one another is the most powerful thing we can do. If we pay attention, our hearts break a little each day. Paying attention right now is rife with lies and distraction, isolation and fear, loss and grief, and violence and cruelty.

bell hooks offers another view of love. For hooks, love means interdependence and service. Her ethic of love views love as a guidepost toward justice, a moral way of being, and a radical life choice. Her view of love asks us to hold beauty and brokenness in our hands.

I need to hear this message right now. As someone who loves fiercely, I understand how love can become a wilted sentiment, a powerless afterthought rather than a life-changing solution. Our challenge is rescuing love from abstraction, silence, distance, and fear.

The Call

There are moments in life when everything changes. Moments when there is a before and after. Moments when our molecular structure shifts. Moments when there is a new normal. Moments when we don’t remember the world as it was. These moments don’t happen often, and I don’t know if we always know they are happening while they are happening. Maybe time allows us perspective and clarity. They are plain as day in hindsight.

This week, a dear friend shared he had received a cancer diagnosis and would begin treatment soon. A person who has the world by the tail had the moment. Hearing the news stopped me in my tracks — a tornado of sadness, anger, grief, and questions tore through my mind. His prognosis and outlook are positive, but I could not shake my feeling that it should not be this way. (I am sure “should” is not the right word to use here, but I don’t know a better way to say that this absolutely sucks.)

I thought about lighting candles and sending prayers for strength and healing. I thought about the family and what they are undoubtedly experiencing. I thought about what I would/will do when another moment happens in my own life. I thought about the continuous course correction of life and moving toward strength and health — hearing a call to action.

Great Love

Great love gets it done. We all have the capacity for great love. As long as I am moving toward great love and acting lovingly in the world, as long as love is my compass, I am headed in the right direction. Knowing everything is working out is part of being headed in the right direction. In a mind filled with fear and doubt and anxiety, the trust and quiet and faith needed to know that it is all working out can be hard to muster. Simply understood, great love is powerful stuff. It is the stuff of open hearts and doors. It is the stuff of clear skies and constellations. It is the stuff of breakthroughs, inventions, and cures. It is the stuff of miracles.

So, what does great love look like in action? It is a combination of vulnerability and strength. It is a combination of root and bud. It is a combination of inhale and exhale. The still small voice inside my head knows when I am acting from great love. It feels right in the truest sense of right and easy in the truest sense of ease. It feels honest in the way I don’t have to lie to myself or anyone else. It is fundamentally about creating, sharing, and expanding.