Enough Love

There is a little boy next to me, he must be 2 or 3.

Even when his legs are fully extended they don’t touch the seat in front of him. Mostly he just touches me, which is okay. His father looks to be in his 40s, salt and pepper hair, broad shoulders and unexciting blue jeans. He’s tall. I assume he is the kind of tall that takes care of people, like reaches for things in the overhead bin for old ladies or carries multiple children to the house at once; that gentle, spacious tall.

Do you want to lay down? he keeps asking his son in English, who does not want to lay down. Baby, do you want to take a nap? he suggests, but the son does not want to take a nap. I like how English sounds in his mouth; it bounces, like rain in a hard city.

We take off. The son and I look out the window, watching the world get smaller and smaller.

Then the father, all six foot mountain of him, curls himself into a seashell and lays his upper body in his son’s lap. Without speaking, his son puts one tiny arm on his shoulder and one tiny arm around his head and his little back is strong and his little eyes are soft, and like this he holds his father. Now the son is making circles with his palm, very small ripples across the landscape of the man he came from. Now, with one finger, he is slowly stroking his father’s wild sideburn. I think they must have done this before.

The father is asleep. If you held them up to your ear, I bet you could hear the ocean inside them. I bet everything in their ocean has a home to belong to. Even I belong here, simply by being here, a bystander in the company of strangers.

Why are some children born into sweetness and some are born into war?

Line up their fathers and how could you tell their tenderness apart. I cannot fathom at this beloved moment or at any other, how a grown man could ever shoot tear gas at another man’s child. How a woman could walk their baby 3000 desperate miles to our doorstep and still some mothers would not let them in. It does not take concrete to build a wall.

Perhaps our anxious leaders have never held space like this, where no one is alone and there is always enough room. I want to bottle it up and share it. I want to swim in it and be free. I want to be immigrant and rooted, here, forty thousand feet above any given border.

I want to be held in the arms of the small world.

by Na Mee

Thus all the beauty and the horrors of this world arise from the same root: the presence or absence of love. Not feeling loved, and then taking that to heart is the only wound there is. It cripples us, causing us to shrivel and contract.

Thus, apart from a few biochemical imbalances and neurological conditions, the diagnostic manual for psychological afflictions (known as the DSM) might as well begin, "Herein are described all the wretched ways people feel and behave when they do not know they are loved."

All the hatred of ourselves and others; all our fear, egoism, communication problems and sexual insecurities; all the pathology, neurosis and destructiveness in the world; the whole nightmare of history, with its bloodshed and cruelty, boil down to one simple fact:

Not knowing we are loved and lovable makes the heart grow cold. And all the tragedy of human life follows from there.

by John Welwood