Some people say that love is more than a feeling. They say love is an action. A verb. To love is to do, to show up in a way that is good and kind and compassionate. I disagree. I do believe that love is more than just a feeling, but it’s not an action. It’s something else entirely. I think that love is a place.

Think about the phrase “falling in love.” Those words evoke a powerful image: letting go, losing control, falling into the unknown. But I think those words are much more literal than we’ve ever given them credit for. I think it truly is a falling in; I think that to fall in love is to gain access to a hidden, secret place inside of us that isn’t a part of our physical existence. It’s a holy place, a room filled with light and softness that has been created inside of us to give God somewhere to live.

I have fallen in love many times, with people and places and things. With moments in time. With words and ideas and with memories. I read a quote recently that said, “Sanskrit has ninety-six words for love; ancient Persian has eighty; Greek three; and English simply one.” One is enough for me, because it’s all the same. There is no distinction between falling in love with a man and falling in love with the way the earth smells after it rains. Each one is powerful and frightening because each one topples me into that space inside me, the room hidden somewhere in the middle of my ribcage, where the only thing that exists is something sacred. I have learned that love doesn’t come from me. I am a scabby, broken little thing who, when left to my own devices, can do little more than simply survive. But love trumps everything, can even outlast survival, and that is much too large a concept for my itty, wee brain to comprehend. It is bigger than me because it has nothing to do with me at all. It exists everywhere, all the time, whether or not I’m paying attention to it. But every once in awhile, if I am very, very lucky, something will happen that will push me past the barriers of what is human and will throw me headlong into that place where love lives. I know when it’s happening because it’s shocking- it takes my breath away. It’s like walking down an empty hallway, feeling lost and alone, and suddenly a door opens and the air is full of voices and laughter and the scraping of chairs. There was something big going on inside that room, but you would have never known, would have just kept on walking and missed it completely, unless someone happened to open the door just as you passed by.

The trick is learning how to have access to that place of love all time. I imagine true happiness comes when falling in love stops surprising us because it’s continuously going on. Something happens and we fall, then before we get the chance to dust ourselves off and climb out of that sacred place into the world of more familiar things, we fall again. It happens over and over and over until we finally decide to stop trying to leave. We throw up our hands, look around us and say, “Well, this looks like a good spot to rest.” We roll out our mats in a comfortable corner and before we know it, that place has begun to feel like home.

There’s a poem by Rumi that begins, “This is love: to fly toward a secret sky.” Like getting on an airplane bound for some distant city, love is a destination. Thankfully, it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to get you there. All you have to do is close your eyes, and let yourself fall.

I’ve been reading Joe Jones, a novel by Anne Lamott (my all-time favorite author- ever). I read this today:

“She said this beautiful thing one time,” says Sam. “She said that when the cafe was full, it was just like a tidepool village. Hermit crabs and seaweed, barnacles and teeny tiny fish.”

Sometimes Annie just gives me the shivers with the way she writes. I swear it’s like reading a page out of my own soul. As I read, I mark the pages where something particularly beautiful or profound jumps out at me so I can go back to it again later. The cover won’t lay flat anymore because of the dozens of pages I’ve dog-eared. This quote really jumped out at me today, because it reminded me of my favorite coffee shop.

I started going there a little over a year ago, because it was close to the place I went to beauty school. The baristas that work there are always cheerful and friendly, and right away I felt at home. I thought the place beautiful, with its high yellow walls covered with local art, and the giant roaster hunkering in a corner like a patient, waiting animal. There are only a few square tables, thick wooden things with heavily waxed tops, pastry crumbs always gathering in the cracks. In the back of the shop is a set of antique Victorian furniture, a stately red velvet couch flanked by two cracked and creaking armchairs that have swans carved into the wooden armrests. I curl up in these chairs and read until my eyes feel strained and bleary, and then I’ll just sit. I’ll listen to the conversations of the people around me and gaze out of the windows at the passing traffic while I sip my coffee. It has been months since I’ve had to specify my drink there; everyone now knows I have a deep and loyal passion for an iced grande caramel sauce americano with no room. I’ve become friends with the baristas, several of them even come to me for haircuts now. I know about their lives, they know about mine.

There’s another regular who comes in all the time, a wonderful older woman with silver hair who the baristas call “Mama Ruth.” There’s a sweet-looking young girl with flushed cheeks and mousy brown hair who comes in when one of the handsome male baristas is working, sits down at one of the tables, and watches him out of the corner of her eye. There’s an artist, a gallery owner and the man in charge of rotating the art that is displayed on the walls of the cafe, who always says hello to me. There’s a man who works for the company delivering food and supplies in a huge white van. Once, someone scribbled “free candy and puppies inside” into the filth covering the back door.

Coming to this place day after day has given me, for the first time in my life, a sense of community. I feel connected there, one of the teeny, tiny fish who flit back and forth in the tidepool. It’s so good to be part of this teeming little village, to be one of the creatures who belongs and adds life and color to the cool, salty water. It helps to know that I have a place to go when I need to be part of, when I’m having one of those days when all you can do, as Annie says, is just patch, patch, patch. Nothing can be all that bad when you know that all the other fish really like having you there to swim with.

The problem with getting your heart broken is that it’s altogether too common. It’s like telling someone you have an ingrown toenail. “Oh, yeah, that happened to me once,” they say. “Don’t worry, it’ll probably clear up in a few days.” So you shuffle along, trying to hide your limp, because having people tell you that it will stop hurting soon doesn’t take away from the fact that right now each step brings excruciating pain.

This situation is confusing and difficult because it’s not a lover that I’ve lost, it’s a best friend. And I think that is so much worse. It’s one thing when a boyfriend dumps you, gives you some ridiculous excuse for why he doesn’t want to be with you anymore. “I’m sorry, you kiss like a fish and I just can’t handle it. This is over.” That’s easy to understand. The two of you were, for whatever reason, incompatible, and the sun will rise again tomorrow and someday you will have someone new to love. But when a friend breaks up with you, that’s rejection on the deepest level imaginable. You feel like a leper, or like Britney Spears after the head-shaving incident. You feel fundamentally unlovable.

The good news is, when your inner-love-cup runneth empty, the universe immediately dispatches an army of love-bearing friends who do their best to fill you back up again. And, surprisingly, it helps. Tuesday evening was spent in the home of some very kind friends who were charmingly unfazed by my frequent bouts of tears. Noel fed me the most delicious couscous salad the world has ever seen, Lauren gave me a mix of weep-free music (”You’re listening to Brandi Carlile? Oh my god, stop! Stop immediately!”), and Colin just held on to me until my tears ran out. Folks have been checking in, calling and emailing and generally making me feel Not Forgotten. The girls at work are distantly concerned (they don’t know me well enough yet to have a game plan for when they come upon me sobbing in the break room) and even my baristas fuss over me like clucky mother hens. I’ve been praying for peace and I’ve gotten it, albeit with a painfully bruised and swollen chest cavity, but… these things take time. I set little markers so that I have something to look forward to: by next week, I’ll probably have stopped crying every day; by Memorial Day, I’ll be able to wake up in the morning without feeling like I slept with an elephant on my chest; by the 4th of July, I’ll be happy. I think coping well is an art form, and I’m really hoping to be compensated for this in heaven. “Well, my child, I dumped a lot of crap on your head but you sure took it like a champ! We’ve decided to give you the oceanside suite.”

I read this wonderful piece of writing called “Letting the Horses Go.” Towards the ends of the piece it says, “Letting go is letting your love come and go; when it brings visitors, you are gracious enough to feed them. When the visitors wish to leave, you give them something to take with them, brush their coats and hold the door open.” I like to think of my heart in that way, the gracious heart-hostess whose guests leave with full bellies and smiling faces. I’m going to work on that, gnaw on that thought for a bit and see what comes of it. But, to be completely honest with you? I’m pretty tired of watching my visitors go. For once, I’d like to have someone come in and say, “Hello darling, I’m home.”

Everything is desolate and barren and forsaken.

I feel lost and confused like when I was little, driving in the car with my dad, and we’d drive past a sign that said “SLOW CHILDREN.” He’d tell me to look around and try to find some. I’m like that David After Dentist kid, worried and incoherent. “Is this real life? Why is this happening to me?”

I am calling on every deity I can think of. I want to be blessed by a stooped and dusty rabbi. I want to feel the coarse fibers of a prayer rug beneath my knees as I cry out to Allah. Hail Mary full of grace.

Things are not going well.

Life is hurting me, and I have that tight, short-of-breath feeling in my chest, as if my heart were being forced through a garlic press. On a gentler day, I would wax philosophic on the benefits of trials and suffering. It is necessary to suffer to be beautiful, I would say. Broken hearts are exquisite: they let you know you’re truly living. But today is not a gentle day and I have been alternating between the urge to burrow deep within the earth with scoopy little mole feet and the mighty desire to overturn the refrigerator. I don’t know how to be a person with feelings, which is unfortunate since I seem to have been born as a human being. “Feelings” is kind of our forte.

I want a salve, something to spread on my chest like a mustard plaster to relieve all this pressure and hurt. Something to soothe me, something to heal me. Something something something that would make this all go away. I’m having Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind fantasies. Tell me, what do you do when you’re sad? What is it that gets you through the wicked, sandpaper days of a heart freshly crushed before time takes over and helps you forget?

For a very long time, I felt like I was held hostage by my past. I crept about, timid and afraid, never knowing when the memory of something horrible would attack me from behind and bash me to the ground. It’s not like that anymore, I have made peace with my past. For that I am thankful. But lately I have begun to feel that familiar restraint, this time in a slightly different way. My mind has clamped hold of me. I feel locked inside an empty jar, lonely and confused, my thoughts echoing madly against the hard and unforgiving walls. There are times that I feel so separated from the world, when I’m almost blinded by the rush and swirl of brain-chatter that seems never to cease. It’s so foggy and muddy up here in my head and I want to quiet things down, to take the advice of a friend who told me I should “shut that shit off,” but I don’t know how. The only thing I can think of to do is pray.

I read somewhere once that you never need to meet God halfway. The only thing you have to do is take one tiny step towards God, and he will rush the rest of the way to you. And God has been everywhere lately, answering prayers left and right and showing off in a way that seems most unbecoming of someone who is supposed to be a wise and loving teacher. I ask for something and blammo, there it is! On the days when I need nothing more than to know that God is there, some sort of fantastical miracle ends up playing out right in front of my eyes. The other day, for instance, a dear elderly woman came into the salon for a perm. She was this tiny little Norwegian thing with a first name that was so difficult to pronounce I felt like my tongue was weighed down with lead every time I tried to say it. It had been years since her last perm, and she had been grooming herself carefully at home, trimming her own hair with a pair of kitchen scissors once a month. She lives alone, and she had walked to the salon that day just to see if she could, because she doesn’t know how much longer she’ll be able to drive herself around. She was cheerful and sweet, this frail little bird in my chair who chirped and twittered and told me stories of growing up in Norway. I loved her madly and immediately. We chatted about her cocker spaniel, the volunteer work she does at the Sons of Norway center, and how the weather was just lovely for gardening.

“But I’m afraid to go into my garden now,” she told me. “That is why I needed a perm today, you know, because my best girlfriend was in her garden last week and she fell. She died. I wanted my hair to look nice for her memorial on Monday. If I fell in my garden no one would know, the neighborhood is so quiet these days.”

I was stunned and gutted and I didn’t know what to say. She was so matter-of-fact. She wasn’t looking for sympathy, she was just making conversation. This information was given to me in the same tone of voice she had used when telling me about her grandchildren. When we had finished with her perm I took her downstairs to the front desk and we were met by a giant smile from the receptionist. There was good news for my little Norwegian bird. The client who had been sitting in the chair next to ours was so touched by her story that she had left enough money to pay for half of the perm. And after I said goodbye and saw her to the door, I ran out to my car and wept in gratitude for being able to witness such an act of kindness. I imagine God was watching all of this with a very satisfied smile on his face, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had reached around and patted himself on the back for a job well done.

Yes, God. Nice one.

My question is, how in the world can I be in the middle of such a pure and beautiful human interaction and still feel so completely separated from it all? The answer is probably fear, because fear is usually the answer to everything. Fear is why I will never go skydiving (the risk of parachute malfunction is much too great), why I hate getting gas after dark (it’s a well-documented fact that women are frequently taken from the murky Chevron parking lot and sold into sex slavery in the middle east), and why I avoid public speaking like the plague (you never know when you will spontaneously vomit and ruin your reputation forever). It has to be fear that keeps me locked away in this mind-jar. I have this odd fascination with people… I am awed and transfixed by their beauty as long as I don’t have to get too close to them- much like the gorgeous, slinky jaguar at the zoo. Give me 3 inches of shatter-proof glass and I am an eager spectator, but toss me into the enclosure and you’ll find me rolled fetal in the farthest corner, begging for deliverance.

I suppose with God’s recent penchant for show-offy, grandiose acts, I could just ask for this one to be taken care of as well. I have no doubt he’s capable of removing my fear, but I’m also pretty certain that the fear will put up a nasty fight. It paces just beyond the safety glass, feet padding quietly on the hard-packed dirt, waiting for something to happen that will toss me in the pit. It corners me every time, breathing bitter jaguar-breath in my face and waiting for me to move so it has an excuse to tear me apart. I’m scared of what my fear will try to do if it sees God marching in with his satisfied little grin, and that’s like double fear, the fear of fear, and that makes me feel really crazy. I want more than anything to shut that shit off. But I don’t know how. The only thing I can think of to do is pray.