Spread Love

I write most mornings. And mostly, it’s just fleeting thoughts, recording events, and processing feelings. Every once in a while a short poem I add to my Substack for fun. I care about the commitment to writing, so I try to show up each morning and create something that wasn’t there before. Sometimes, I sit at my laptop after recording the date, and just look around. The room never really changes, but today I guess maybe my perspective did.

There’s a bag that sits off to my left filled with my daughter’s artwork. It has been there for months. It’s orange, teal, and white. We got it when we shopped at The Art of Simple—a store in Seaside, Florida, last March. I have looked over at that bag while I process my morning thoughts hundreds of times. I have seen the writing on the bag, but mostly all I’m ever registering when I take notice of it is the artwork that’s inside of it. This morning, though, I finally let my brain focus on the words written on the side of the bag: “Spread Love”.

Words are funny. For some, they aren’t really all that interesting. Words can be meaningless. Words can hurt. Words can heal. Words can make you think, and they can also arrest thought in a moment. For me…words have always held a great deal of power. It is a continued work in progress, in fact, for me to sus out which words really deserve the power I give them. Because I guess that’s really what’s true, isn’t it? Words are just collections of letters until we designate purpose, meaning, and power to them. Without our interpretation, words are just character clusters.

When I write like this, I listen to “The Piano Guys”, a duo I found on Apple music who have a variety of modern and classical music that they’ve recorded with piano, violin, and cello instrumentals. This music glides into my ears and I can become so moved, that mid-sentence, I will stop typing, close my eyes, and just bathe in the wordless story reverberating all throughout my body. It feels a lot like love. High notes and low notes, tempo changes, building volume, long stretches of sound to let you linger in a feeling…I don’t know a fraction of what I wish I knew about composing or playing music, but I can tell you I feel it in my bone marrow. It feels like it is communicating to me a story my soul tries to write every day, and the music has already written it. It already knows the ending.

To my right, there is a window that faces East. When I sit down to write, there is no light. It is dark outside, the moon still high. As the morning marches on, the trees become silhouetted and the clouds are like stretched blue-gray cotton against a sky not yet graced by the pink of a morning sunrise. Day is breaking, and my mind drifts to the time. I only have so much before my next task, where I will have to remove myself from this ritual and attend elsewhere. And today, I have been humbly reminded of the most-worthy task of all: Spread Love.

If you’re reading this, I hope the still small voice inside of you whispers the truth of your value into your heart, and you hear it with your ears, clear as a bell. I hope you feel warmth from the inside out that spreads in the way that it touches you head to toe. I hope you allow a moment of acknowledgement for yourself and the miracle you are, bolstering you to reflect the miracle in others right back to them.

We already know the forces in this world that threaten our peace and break our hearts. If we give those things our attention, they multiply, don’t they? So today, try offering yourself a little grace, and watch what once looked like unending stretches of blue-gray transform into glowing pinks, purples, and yellow, instead. And let it spread. Let light in. Spread Love.