November 2, 2019 (onbeing.org)

Every once in a while, I come across a new way of seeing a well-trodden word. Rev. angel Kyodo williams offers one for perhaps the most overstretched of them all — love:

“Love is space. It is developing our own capacity for spaciousness within ourselves to allow others to be as they are. That is love. And that doesn’t mean that we don’t have hopes or wishes that things are changed or shifted, but that to come from a place of love is to be in acceptance of what is, even in the face of moving it towards something that is more whole, more just, more spacious for all of us.”

Reversing williams’s phrasing, I’ve been thinking about what shifts when we think about space as an expression of love. When I was in New York last week, each community garden I passed became not just a lush refuge from the city’s busyness but also an articulation of the love we hope for one another as neighbors and citizens — everyone who had advocated and tended to the garden was making space for all who had yet to pass by. Seeing love as space also offers another way of articulating the atrocities happening at the U.S. border. What does it mean when we do not make space for human beings? Is this the opposite of love?

williams’s definition also takes us inward — toward the space we can create for our whole selves. It can feel difficult to offer yourself permission to simply be. But thankfully we can use Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese” as a permission slip:

“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.”

If you needed some sign from the universe to make space — in big ways, in small, both inward and out — let this be it.

Yours,
Kristin Lin
Editor, The On Being Project

P.S. — Pádraig Ó Tuama, poet and good friend of On Being, will be in the Netherlands in November speaking at two events, including a launch for the Dutch edition of his book In the Shelter.