Love Warriors

Inspired by the words and spirit and leadership of Glennon Doyle (and Abby Wambach's call for more anthems:)

The Meadow

By Marie Howe

As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, 

so the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together

and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers.

Imperceptibly heaving with the old impatience, it knows

for certain that two horses walk upon it, weary of hay.

The horses, sway-backed and self important, cannot design

how the small white pony mysteriously escapes the fence every day.

This is the miracle just beyond their heavy-headed grasp,

and they turn from his nuzzling with irritation. Everything

is crying out. Two crows, rising from the hill, fight

and caw-cry in mid-flight, then fall and light on the meadow grass

bewildered by their weight. A dozen wasps drone, tiny prop planes,

sputtering into a field the farmer has not yet plowed,

and what I thought was a phone, turned down and ringing,

is the knock of a woodpecker for food or warning, I can’t say.

I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone.

But in this world, where something is always listening, even

murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan

in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be

all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget

what you are. There will come a day when the meadow will think

suddenly, water, root, blossom, through no fault of its own,

and the horses will lie down in daisies and clover. Bedeviled,

human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words

that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled

among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life.

Other people’s sentences and art work have saved me many times. Songs have kept my light from dimming. Paintings have allowed me to breathe deep and remember color. Poetry has brought me back from the brink. And Women’s memoirs have comforted me like a mother. Women’s stories particularly because they took the time to try to know and then reveal themselves intimately and maybe even love themselves.  I read because the words were like a balm. 

Glennon Doyle’s “Carry On, Warrior” was such a nourishing book for me when I was dripping with babies. And then “Love Warrior” and then the inimitable, “Untamed”. Her words made me feel less alone in the world. I wrote some of those words down and sung this song to myself before the pandemic and during the pandemic and still sing it to myself when I need a spiritual pep talk. 

I am a Love Warrior and there are others out there too.

So to sing this song is to anoint my own throat with these holy words. To sing them is to bless myself. To sing them is to uncloak myself and with gratitude for all who came before, all who are here, all who are the future thrivers to say aha - I see you, thank you for doing the work of love, for not giving up.  To cry out to my love warriors, to my wolf- pack, I am here too! Yes, we can do hard things together.

LOVE WARRIOR

I don’t know if I’m going to make it here

I’ve got all this coming at me

And it’s feeding all my fears

Every story in the newspaper

Every advertisement on the screen

They don’t look or act like me 

Or at least not who I want to be

I want to run from it all

I want to try to disappear

But a still small voice is keeping me here

Maybe I’m a love warrior

Love Warrior

Maybe I’m a love warrior

I’m so hungry from always starving myself

Of everything I know I need 

Of who I’m really meant to be

What if I’m the one

That I’ve been waiting for

All this crying on the bathroom floor

Oh that tile feels so nice and cool

What if every miracle

Starts just like this

With all of this unlearning 

A reckoning

What if I’m a love warrior

Love Warrior

What if I’m a love warrior

Now I’m finding all these words

Just like prayers that were meant for me

Little whispers in my little ear

‘Til it’s my own voice that I hear

I’m thinking maybe 

If I can do the next right thing

Oh, just what is right in front of me, sister

Maybe I was born just for this then

First the revelation, then the revolution

First the pain and waiting 

Then the Rising

I am a love warrior

Love Warrior

I am a love warrior

And if we’re gonna rise up 

We’re going to do it laughing and singing 

We’re going to do it dancing and howling

With our wolf-pack 

Through this brutiful life

And if there is so such thing 

There is no such thing as “other people’s” children

Then there is no such thing as other people’s fathers and mothers

And sisters and brother’s 

Aren’t we all son and daughters and everything in between

We belong to each other

We can do hard things together

We are Love Warriors.

We are Love Warriors