Love Is the Fabric of the Universe

Toward healing our story of nature

Welcome to a new series at Nature :: Spirit! My book Kissed by a Fox, after a dozen years in print, just earned out its advance—huzzah!—and in honor of this milestone, and an audiobook coming out later this year, I’m highlighting passages in the book for a fresh look. Together we’ll go behind the scenes of the writing process.

Today’s passage comes from chapter 10, “Family,” where Tim enters the picture. A little context for starters, then the excerpt.

Tim and I met early in our first semester of college, though neither of us remembers the day. We soon developed a thing for each other, but it never really went anywhere, to my great disappointment. It couldn’t go anywhere at the time because I had one big strike against me: Tim’s mother was also named Priscilla. Can you imagine any eighteen-year-old boy not choking on that bite? So during college Tim and I eyed each other mostly from a distance, and after graduating we married other people and lived our adult lives on opposite coasts.

But years later I got a letter from Tim, an actual snail mail letter, addressed by hand—already in 2002 a rarity, like an Iron Age artifact suddenly showing up in a mailbox. I took one look at the envelope, and my heart jumped. I knew that handwriting.

It took two more years, but when we did finally come together, it was an explosion of love. Seismic. (I tell the whole love story in the book!)

The passage I want to highlight today is related to one of the main themes of Kissed by a Fox: the stories the Western world tells about nature, and how those stories sever us not just from nature but also from ourselves. From our own hearts. From each other.

The Western world holds an unusually jaundiced view of nature, starting with the natural world inside us: human nature. Various of the chapters in Kissed by a Fox are braided with stories about how this negative view came to be—through Augustine and the heavy hand of empire, through early modern Europe and the rise of capitalism. “So far as I am aware,” the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins once wrote, “we are the only society on earth that thinks of itself as having risen from savagery, descended from a ruthless nature. Everyone else believes they are descended from gods” (The Use and Abuse of Anthropology, 100).

In the Western story of nature, competition drives evolution, and until very recently we thought of it as stronger—much stronger—than cooperation. Love, in this equation, is not “natural,” animal-like. It’s something human beings can arrive at only by transcending our (selfish, violent) animal nature. So love belongs first to us and by extension to our companion animals. In animal science it’s been so forbidden to recognize love among any other animals that until recently, interpreting animal behavior in terms of affection got called out as anthropomorphism. We arrogated love to human beings and so built a solid philosophical wall between ourselves and other creatures. The emphasis on competition is changing now, but there are thousands of years of thought-history along these lines to overcome.

So when Tim and I found each other again at the age of forty-seven, it changed my worldview. It centered a different story: that love is rooted in nature. That it’s normal. And the new story dazzled me. It shifted something big inside me, and I needed to talk about it.

Here is what I wrote:

I am all for the joyful surprise—and getting together with Tim was the most joyful and surprising event of my life. We were drunk with amazement and bliss. But I am also aware that part of my joy was the shock of the new thought born from these events: that love in fact does get fulfilled. That connection is not only possible but normal, built into the nature of things.

I think what people may be searching for in the romantic ending is some hope about nature itself. The ferocity of our commitment to happily ever after might have to do with the even more ferocious tragedy and despair built into our story of nature—into our evolutionary tale of natural selection by competition and into our dog-eat-dog economic life. If nature rewards only scrambling to the top, if at the heart of things the heart doesn’t matter and in the world of commerce affection and empathy have no purchase, then love will be segregated to the private sphere, where its most obvious power becomes throwing two people into each other’s arms. We celebrate the couple because we are so reluctant to celebrate love elsewhere. Much of the time we can’t even see it elsewhere. We’ve disallowed it from most of our public relationships, including our relationship with the land. “Our lack of intimacy with each other is in direct proportion to our lack of intimacy with the land,” writes Terry Tempest Williams. “We have taken our love inside and abandoned the wild.”

The death of nature meant, at heart, the death of empathy for other creatures, including human beings. It meant death of the view that connection is stitched into the heart of things, that love is the fabric of the universe. Of course to say this is a statement of faith; of course it cannot be proven empirically. But then, neither can the story we have lived with ever since—of the Earth as dead and connections severed.

When Tim and I came together, I felt reverberations of that alternate story: spirit and matter, love and need, are not separate. I’d gambled long before that they were faces of the same reality, but now I was experiencing it. I was being initiated into ecstasy.

I marveled at the simplicity of the bliss: all those years of searching for purpose, when all along it was simply about connection. Getting relationships right was turning out to be the meaning of my life.

At forty-seven, I had turned a corner: from the despairing and tragic worldview I’d been brought up with to a more hopeful one centered on love and connection. Spirit and matter were getting braided together again within me. My worldview was healing.

The process has only deepened in the years since. And it has become my mission to show a path toward healing the worldview of the entire society. Stories can make or break us, and the story of nature that the Western (and now the world) system is founded on is rushing us headlong toward our own destruction.

“The truth about stories,” says writer Thomas King, of Cherokee descent, “is that that’s all we are” (King, The Truth About Stories, 2).

A different story is possible. And by extension, a different world.

One more note about chapter 10. I wrote it when Tim and I had been together seven years—often a challenging season in a relationship. It certainly was in ours.

At the time, Tim was having a Very Bad Year: grieving his parents and the loss of a business, working a new job under a gaslighting boss. Most of that year Tim felt angry and frustrated and sad and confused. I, by contrast, had just signed my first book contract and was sailing forward with finishing the book, exulting in the writing process, more vibrant and happy than I’d ever felt in my life. To say we were not on the same page is an understatement. We weren’t even in the same universe! It was hard—very hard—to relate to each other that year.

So writing our love story, making it come alive on the page, was a tough assignment. The bone-deep delight we’d felt when falling in love was difficult to call up when so little of it was available in our current life. I had to work to remember the yes. Writing the love story was a practice. I bet you understand what I mean.

But when I read the chapter now, I’m happy to say that I can find no hint of the shadow our relationship was under when I wrote it. Somehow, in the writing, I managed to be faithful to the joy. In hindsight, it was a way of enacting the very thing I was writing about: that love really does lie at the heart of it all, that joy and delight fuel the universe—even when we can’t feel them.

I was talking with my friend K about this recently. K is a social worker, a friend of both Tim and me since those long-ago days in college. When I said that writing our love story that year “took some discipline,” she burst out laughing. Then she asked, “Do you think writing it helped you?”

What a perceptive question!

I thought for a moment, then I knew for sure: yes, it did. Having to dig deep to bring forward the love helped to carry me across that tough time.

We did make it through that year, and the following one too. And things did get better. Life opened up again, as life does.

Tim and I are celebrating twenty years together now. We’re still in awe of coming together, and we’re especially in awe of how life has guided us since then. Every day we are overcome with gratitude for our life together.

We’re still feeling the yes. Still grateful for the love.

Have you ever used writing to keep you in a good place? Does the idea of healing a worldview jog any thoughts or feelings for you? Be sure to let us know in the comments!

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