Day 21: love
a poem a day in the month of may
Dear friends,
Today’s word is love, and I want to ask you to think about love differently today. Ask what love means, how it shows up in ways that are unexpected, in ways that we’ve maybe forgotten about. Where does love show up quietly in your everyday life, to hold you in the midst of the chaotic world outside your soul, outside your door?
How does love hold you?
I have a notes app full of grocery lists. One seems to be called “milk,” and follows with a series of necessities that I decided we needed last week, a love note to my own everyday life. On another, it begins “Garlic,” with plans for a new kind of meal that we will try next Monday evening, an exploration in care and calling our bodies tender and good. We think love notes are the ones left on the bedside, the ones written across the bathroom mirror with a tube of bright red lipstick, but it’s often more than that, more in the everyday, in the grocery lists that are typed out last minute or slowly over the week as we prepare to love our everyday life, our everyday people, to feed our bellies and our hearts until we realize what love truly is.
Love is the Shape of the Sidewalk
Some mornings,
love looks like a clump of kids
in Pokémon hoodies and unicorn backpacks,
racing with abandon,
while parents sip coffee
and recount war stories of the night before—
half-awake, mostly present.
Love is in the porch drop-offs
and porch parties:
day drinking while kids play,
a box of hand-me-downs,
flowers, muffins, or hot cocoa,
tucked inside a small bag
with a big message: I see you.
It's found in the text:
Need anything from the store?
The shoveled sidewalk.
The sedum cuttings and tulip bulbs
that remind us each season—
love is resilient
when tended with care.
It lives in how we share grief,
soothe each other's spirals,
celebrate the smallest wins:
a full night's sleep,
a job interview,
poop in the potty (not yours, probably).
It's in driveway therapy sessions,
and lingers over fence posts
as our kids attempt
to stage a backyard coup.
This is how love holds me—
not loud or showy,
but steady as the perennials
I received from a neighbor's split—
a reminder that together
love blooms bigger, fuller,
and the right amount of community
can compost life's hardest days.
-jmt
Ik onkar
The first words of the
Guru Granth Sahib
The sacred scripture of the
Sikhi
Tells us we are one
Humanity and Divinity
Wrapped in the holy ties of being
Indistinguishable
–
Not the words I learned
When I sat in the red velvet pew
And heard that
Love was patient
Love was kind
Love came in the way I acted,
Known in the unconditional
Of relationship
–
But now I see the holy words
Are written everywhere
In tongues I cannot speak
In ways I do not walk
In faces never seen before
That speak of a love that is
Me
Not just lives in me
In the spaces between what I say and do
But in my very breathing
In the cells
That make my liver and my hair
–
Ik onkar
If God is me and I am God
How can I not but
Love
Myself.