F is for Falling in Love Again and Again and Again

June 23, 2025

Dare I speak of love while bombs are falling?

What threatens to float to the top of my heart and imagination instead are feelings of fear and fury, fighting words.

Dare I speak of love in these times?

Dare I not?

We just returned home from a trip to see son Michael and his family in Brooklyn, NY. All visits with the family are special, but what was extra special about this visit was that we got to attend granddaughter Maddie’s preschool graduation.

I fell in love with her preschool – the teachers, the other children, the whole vibe. The teachers openly expressed their love for each and every child (there were only 7 in Maddie’s PreK class!). As the teachers read the children’s quotes about what they had learned during the year, they spoke in awe of the little ones’ hearts and wisdom. The songs that the children sang and the teachers’ parting messages carried words of affection and care. As I watched, I kept thinking – we adults need to pay more attention to this, to direct our attention more to love and friendship and understanding than to power over and domination and the bottom line.

It's the next day. We sit on the sofa, Maddie and her just turned 10 years old brother Nolan. Maddie and I color “princesses” as Nolan plays a video game with a good friend who lives across the city, cheering his friend on as the game progresses. A bit later, Maddie paints my fingernails sparkly blue and sparkly pink, giggling the whole time as she realizes the polish is extending down to my knuckles! Later, Nolan picks up his guitar and asks if I can record him as he sings and plays “Sweet Caroline.”

Of course I speak of love. How can I not?

One day later, bombs fall. Impulsively, rashly, cruelly. Endangering just about everyone in the world.

Why why why? I hate to say that I am not surprised.

I think back to Maddie’s teachers’ stories about their children’s imagination and creativity. I think about how essential imagination is to creating a loving and just family, nation, world. Kentucky writer and environmentalist Wendell Berry speaks about this in his novel “Hannah Coulter”:

“Want of imagination makes things unreal enough to be destroyed. By imagination I mean knowledge and love. I mean compassion. People of power kill children, the old send the young to die, because they have no imagination. They have power. Can you have power and imagination at the same time? Can you kill people you don’t know and have compassion for them at the same time?”

I don’t think so.

The grief is weighing me down again.

So I get up every morning determined to fall in love with the world and people in it, to know it and to imagine how wonderful it can be. Over and over again. In spite of it all, I remind myself that I am a small essential part of this beautiful and glorious and still confusing and painful world.

I remember Mary Oliver’s poem "Wild Geese":

“You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.”

I let my imagination carry me toward loving it all, while still holding the grief and pain. I fall in love again. Every damn day.

“Maddie at Almost 5 and a Half”

She knows how to dress for the occasion! And the kids all go bare-foot (or are in socks) in class.