This month, I wanted to start this newsletter with a poem by the American poet David Romtvedt, titled “Sunday Morning Early.”
My daughter and I paddle red kayaks
across the lake. Pulling hard,
we slip easily through the water.
Far from either shore, it hits me
that my daughter is a young woman
and suddenly everything is a metaphor
for how short a time we are granted:
the red boats on the blue-black water,
the russet and gold of late summer’s grasses,
the empty sky. We stop and listen to the stillness.
I say, “It’s Sunday and here we are
in the church of the out of doors,”
then wish I’d kept quiet. That’s the trick in life—
learning to leave well enough alone.
Our boats drift to where the chirring
of grasshoppers reaches us from the rocky hills.
A clap of thunder. I want to say something truer
than I love you. I want my daughter to know that,
through her, I live a life that was closed to me.
I paddle up, lean out, and touch her hand.
I start to speak then stop.
This week, my daughter turns 24. I love her, I love who she is becoming every day, I love this poem, and I wanted to reflect on just how much I use that word – love.
I love the Kate Spade bag that the Kraft Heinz company gifted to me, because I love the opportunity to walk alongside them. I love walking in the crisp air and the glorious color of the leaves in autumn, the dappled sunlight on the sidewalk. I love the cheese enchiladas red sauce at Red Iguana in Salt Lake City. I love all these things. And I love saying the word love, the way the word moves through my mouth to sit comfortably on my lips.
But for some reason, when it comes to saying I love you to a person, I’m reluctant. Even to my husband, my children, my closest friends – sometimes the four-letter word just doesn’t come. So I felt that it was important for me to untangle that yarn ball in my head, and drill down into why it’s hard to say to the people I love the most.
I think it’s because when you say it to a person, the word takes on a life of its own. The leaves can’t respond, can’t take into their heart that I love them – but a person can, and does. Few words come close to having the same ripples in a pond as the word love. The act of saying it out loud becomes infinitely more profound. There’s a Russian saying – “Words are not birds. Once they have flown away, they cannot be recaptured.” Saying you love someone carries with it this implicit promise that your actions must also fall in line. I want to make sure that I don’t somehow profane the word by overusing it, and then falling short in how I actually show that love. To do so would be to betray them, and betray myself, all in the span of a careless breath.
And maybe there are times where I hold myself back from saying it, because the word just doesn’t do justice to the dimensions in which I truly love someone. My love isn’t just a bird soaring through the clouds – it’s the smell of soil that nurtures the flower, the whipping gale of a coastal storm, the soft sigh of a log in the fireplace. We put so much on the shoulders of one word.
I paddle up, lean out, and touch her hand.
I start to speak then stop.
____________________________
You can use a word so much, there’s no connection between the symbols and the purpose anymore. Has that ever happened to you? It’s a phenomenon called semantic satiation. And with a word like love, to strip it of its meaning is a grievous wound to inflict.
What are you trying to convey, when you use the word love? When do you use these words? And when do you pull yourself back, because it seems almost too sacred to do so?
