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Part of the problem lies in the meanings of the words ‘love’ and ‘fear.’ Fear is that tense, unsettled feeling that makes us want to fly off in the opposite direction as fast as possible. Or to fight and annihilate the other, or to freeze. But sometimes fear saves our life. It’s useful, necessary. The trick is to figure out when it’s appropriate and when it’s a regurgitation of a past memory, response, or feeling with only slender connections to the present moment NOW.

Which brings up the question of love. In our culture we see love as that sweeping hormonal experience of desire that unites two people in bliss, or as the sweet, fierce protective instinct a parent has for her or his children. Both are kinds of love, because love is that oceanic, ecstatic state of communion that encompasses all things. That’s the Kabbalistic version, as embodied by the sephirot Chesed, the kindness that goes beyond boundaries, the proactive expression of expansiveness that is a prime mover because it has no cause. 

This definition feels intellectual and nebulous. Here in this material world, love needs be so much more concrete. At least in my opinion; I am a practical person. I find the Christian scriptures helpful in understanding love: “Love is patient and kind, love is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” (1 Corinthians 13)

This is a tall order, rather like the command given by Tom Hanks at the end of Saving Private Ryan: “Earn this.” It’s an impossible task and yet the necessary one, simultaneously. Here again we have both/and showing up, rather than either/or. 

In my day to day life, love looks more like the Corinthian prescription than the Kabbalistic one, though I intend for Chesed to inform my actions at all times. I strive to be kind, humble, and truthful. Patience is not my strong point, but it is certainly my growing point. Most of all, for me, love looks like neither Testament, but like service. It is the small acts I perform as a matter of commitment, day in, day out, regardless of how I feel or what I really would rather be doing. Mostly what I would rather be doing is sipping wine in a cafe in Paris, or ambling through the Pinacoteca Vaticano while looking forward to a long, slow meal in Trastevere.

Instead, here in my little Manhattan kitchen, I cook broccoli and cauliflower for my children because cruciferous vegetables prevent cancer. I stock the refrigerator with non-rbgh milk and yogurt, and I look for snacks without obesity-causing, disease-predisposing high-fructose corn syrup. This is love. Pedestrian, certainly. Love, yes. And I will add that my children poke fun of me continuously for insisting on nutrition. I hope that the years of pushing fruits, vegetables, and whole grains will slowly accrete into good health for my children. But I’m not winning any accolades now, while they’d much rather be eating fritos and candy bars.

Along with the physical care-taking goes emotional care-taking. Sometimes that looks like me saying, “Great job! I’m so pleased that you worked hard and brought up that science grade!” Sometimes, because I am my children’s parent and not simply their good buddy, it consists of me saying, “A D in science is not acceptable. No TV or computer time until you do the work it takes to improve that grade.” 

Children’s emotional needs change with time. Parents engage in a dance between toughness and allowing. My 17 year old daughter leaves for college in August; she is in the process of separating. This process requires her to beat up on me emotionally. I’m the punching bag. It doesn’t feel good but I guess it develops within her some necessary emotional muscle with which to stand on her own in the impending months. 

Yesterday she was wait-listed at one of the colleges which she really liked. She was hurt and upset. Her immediate reaction was to blame me. I guess she experienced that painful fear that she wouldn’t have the life she longed for. So she yelled and screamed at me that nothing I had ever taught her was correct, and she had no faith in me, and nothing I said had any validity.

But I know I told her to keep her grades up at their customary stellar heights last semester, the first semester of her senior year, and she didn’t. She had a good excuse: she went on a mission with a charitable organization to a developing nation, and missing two weeks out of her senior year coursework left her struggling with an already enormous and ambitious work load for the rest of the term. Her experience with the charity was amazing, and what she saw in an impoverished city shocked her and woke her up in a way that staying home and getting all A’s wouldn’t have. But she paid a price for that awakening.

So she called me. I was picking up the little one from her nursery school but quickly rearranged my day to take her to the ER. It’s the kind of juggling act moms do all the time: recalibrating  plans, finding a sitter on short notice, arriving to handle a difficult situation within fifteen minutes of hearing about it. I’ve become a woman who is no longer convinced that women’s liberation was a victory. The burden of child-rearing, physical and mental and logistical, still falls primarily on women, from what I can see. But now we’re expected to be brain surgeons or trial attorneys while we nurture and raise healthy children who have high self-esteem and good values. From my perspective, what women’s lib succeeded in was 1, making sure that women never sleep; 2, making sure women always feel guilty–because we feel guilty when we’re at work that we’re not with our babies, and we feel guilty when we’re mothering our children that we’re not at our jobs earning lots of money; and 3, adding the extra pressure of achieving in the world outside the home while the demands of home and child-rearing are as intense as they always have been.

And I do know that men take on this role sometimes. My little one has a friend whose dad is the mom, and I applaud him for it. Perhaps it should always have been about choice, not about making more burdens. There’s a reason for a division of labor within a family.

Back to the germ theory of children. The staff at the hospital took one look at my daughter’s drawn face and they got her into a room with an IV in her arm. The fear was appendicitis. But the pain she felt never localized into one place, that lower right quadrant of the abdomen. After five hours,  three bags of saline solution and two different anti-nausea meds, the first of which made her flip out, requiring benedryl to counteract, she was discharged. “Probably a virus,” they said, “drink liquids.”

And a virus it must have been, because twelve hours later I was ill. And it wasn’t the first time. I was a little surprised fifteen years ago, when my oldest daughter first went to nursery school, that suddenly I was struggling with a cold every few weeks. By sixth grade, when my daughter had strep throat twice month and gave it to me every time, I was just thrilled when the doctor yanked her tonsils. Children are Typhoid Mary’s, every one of them. And now I just automatically include immune system boosting supplements into my diet. And whether or not the FDA sued airborne: that stuff works good! Figures the FDA would want to harass the maker. The FDA just wants us to buy medicines that only work for 60% of the people and have dreadful side-effects, so we have to buy more medicines. After all, the FDA protects big pharma, NOT the American people.

Speaking of Americans, why is so much of our television so bad? I’ve become a BBCA addict. MI5 is back, and better than ever! I am just in awe of the understated writing that is still suspenseful. Moments where what is left unsaid brims with excitement….

There are the small heart-aches we who are alive on the earth face every day: loss of loved ones, divorce, loss of an income, illness, malaise. There are the larger, transpersonal heart-aches: war, famine,  plague, cataclysm. I talk about this a lot in radio interviews, when hosts ask me why I wrote a novel where the worst happens to the main character over and over again. I always respond, how do we affirm a good God in the face of all these heart-aches?

And then there is man’s inhumanity to man. Again, there are the individual and transpersonal cruelties. Today I am saddened over the individual ones, the intimate hurts people inflict on each other. In my own family, my sister betrayed me, maneuvering to get my father to cut me out of his will, and my mother collaborated with her. It wasn’t a lot of money because my father was not a wealthy man. Still, I was his daughter. This kind of behavior is not something you ever forget, though I have moved on. That was many years ago. Currently, there’s a problem with my husband’s parents, who largely treat our young daughter as if she doesn’t exist.

It’s mystifying. My husband has two wonderful daughters, one by his previous marriage, who is almost 18, and ours together, a funny, charming, bright little sweetie who is three and full of wonder and mischief. She is just as much their grand-daughter as their older one is, but they consistently demonstrate reluctance to see her. My husband’s mother once told me that she had a ‘privileged’ relationship with my husband’s older daughter. But she tried with that relationship. She put time and effort and care into being with my step-daughter. Lots of time, in fact. By contrast, she makes no effort at all with our little one. Rather, she uses every excuse to avoid her.

My husband’s parents are intelligent people. Both have PhD’s. One would think they would understand the impact that their behavior has: on their son, who is hurt; on their older grand-daughter, who loves her little sister and is acutely conscious of the inequities in the two relationships, and uncomfortable because of them; on an innocent little girl, who wants to love and be loved.

Man’s inhumanity to man. It’s inexcusable, and happens every day.

Host Rory Pinto interviewed me.

I’ve been heavily promoting my novel IMMORTAL and enjoying the process. Watching my husband sculptor Sabin Howard hustle to raise money for our family, I realized long ago that I wasn’t just in the business of writing books, I was also in the business of selling them. Talking on the radio is one of the ways I’ve been getting the word out about my novel.

By and large, it’s been a pleasure. Blogtalk radio attracts interesting characters, and I’ve enjoyed everyone I’ve spoken to: Pete Klein, Barbara Alexander, Sydney Molare, the sprightly ladies of HealthyWealthyWow, Steve Bonenberger. Yesterday I spoke with a young woman who interviewed me for WVBR 93.5 Ithaca, Maria, and she was bright and charming. 

But Rory’s an old friend who went through the Barbara Brennan School of Healing with me, so our chat had a special flavor. The BBSH is kind of like…4 years of spiritual boot camp, getting your psychological ass kicked so you tear down self-sabotaging old patterns while simultaneously interfacing in meditation and healing work with angels, who want to guide and uplift humanity. It’s a journey and a crucible, a mystery school with a left-brain twist for the modern age. It’s not easy and it’s not a perfect institution but the BBSH is wondrous, and it is life-changing.  

So Rory shares a language and set of experiences with me. We’re like two old soldiers who survived a campaign together, the Battle of Transformation. And he’s a skilled interviewer, a master at leading conversation into avenues of soulfulness and inquiry. He brought up issues of love and loss, the nature of choice in human life, victory and spirit, communion with the divine. These are the reasons I write.