Dear reader,
Happy Fall and happy Dolly Day! I just treasure how clever humans can be: September 25 > 9/25 > 925 > 9 to 5 (her feature film debut and legendary song). Dolly’s Songbook was the first coffee table book I ever bought for myself.
Dolly knew herself. She bet on herself. She got to know people, and she bet on ‘em. Dolly sure gave the most throughout her time on Earth. May we all continue to learn a lot from her spirit. Her fairy dust is still all around. I sure feel it.
Last week was the first week I’ve skipped writing for this newsletter because I simply knew I had nothing to say last week. I’m learning to trust that awareness. I have always had deep respect for people who are kind + very intentional with their words, speaking only when they really have something to say.
Silence can be a beautiful thing in our noisy times, a far cry from emptiness, and I’m of the belief that it is not made to be unnecessarily filled.
I just finished reading Theo of Golden by Allen Levi. I’m fascinated by Levi’s life story. He’s lived as a songwriter, attorney and judge, land caretaker, and now author. I was in awe of how this first book of his resonated with so many people. Reading it revealed to me a deeper truth about us all: we crave being known.
In the novel, the main character Theo is a well-travelled old man from Portugal who makes his way to a small town in Georgia (for a few reasons, we learn in the end), and, in his time there, he buys portraits of local people by a local artist that have been hung up in a coffee shop, bestows them upon the subjects of the portraits, and deeply listens to their stories and offers words of encouragement all along the way.
I find that we can be loved without being known.
I find that we can love someone without really knowing them.
And I find that we can really know someone without the circumstance calling us to love them, at least not with the love society usually references.
Another in-tune example of this was in the new film adaptation of Ali Hazelwood’s (another multihyphenate, a neuroscientist-romance author) The Love Hypothesis on Prime. The main character Olive closes the story with this gem, and it shone so brightly I had to screenshot:
Bonds form only when being together—being known, being loved, or those exquisitely rare experiences of being both known + loved—is more stable than being alone.
I’ll always bet on the bond of loving + knowing. Head and heart alignment. Is there any stronger human force?
To going beyond the surface,
Anjali