Love & Poiesis

For Josephine Collins

To love through heartbreak

Nine moons have passed since the death of my son. The breath of every sentence that I have composed for this newsletter, in the time that has elapsed, has grown out of my love for Raphie and all that he means to me.

It is not my wish to write another bereavement post: I have already explored, at depth, the spectrum of emotions that our loss surged me into, and as fascinating as my pain is I’ve had rather enough of it. Of course the pain lingers, but the profound love I bear for my son to this day is more powerful and substantial than the grief that remains.

This love brings about sharing: that is the nature of love. So that is why I continue to share my stories about love and the miracles augured by love; that love is part of me, and it is what connects me to him.

It has been the greatest challenge and sole object of my life to remain unconditional. If you take nothing else at all from my writings, let it be this: to love is worth every moment of grief, however excruciating it may seem.

To love through heartbreak, through the grief that lingers long after the boy whom I treasured has gone. To love the world as my son loved me: with totality, with unmediated presence. To love him in death, and to love even that power of nature that took him from me.

It doesn’t lessen the pain, but it does make it bearable. I let myself cry over him at least once each day, and I probably always will.

But the pain of love has its gifts, and the will to create is one of them. Each breath of ordinary life becomes precious; each day creates itself in the image of love. Raphael is not a part of this world, but he is a part of me that loves this world. Anyone who has loved me has been touched by him in some unseen way.

If you have resonated with my trauma and grief, then you have known him. If you have connected with my storytelling, then it is through him. If you have shared in my surrender, then you have loved him as I do.

The child creates the mother

I spent four years sleepless, hoisting babies on my hip, negotiating naptimes and spoon-feeding mush to little mouths. I know the terrain of motherhood. It all passed so fleetingly, in hindsight, the interminable stress and mess of caregiving; as though it never happened, as if it wasn't real, as though it weren’t me who went through it all.

The child creates the mother: to become one you live through the agony of a mother’s love, the transformation it brings as you devote yourself to the infant in your care. Presently the helpless baby becomes a stout toddler, cute and crazy; and then a little person emerges, a being with a will and destiny of his own.

When Raphie was my own to hold, I imagined the man he would become: tall and strong, with hands that fix and build; moody and tempestuous and convinced that he is right. I imagined all the arguments we would have, imagined melting into the blue of his eyes when all would be forgiven.

In my mind, I drew the line of his metamorphosis from my plump little nursling to a wild and willful adolescent, a passionate young man, a steady adult. I thought about everything he would learn and everything he would reject; I prepared myself to love whatever he became.

It took a long time to understand how selfish those dreams of mine had been. His death snuffed them out, and I grieved for them as I grieved for my baby. Suddenly my life wasn’t worth anything, because I would not be sharing it with him. It became impossible to go on, but there was nothing else to do.

The terrain of motherhood accustoms one to impossible scenarios. I knew that a mother’s love prescribed a world of pain, but I did not know how much. That love surged on like a tidal wave wrecking the shoreline of my heart; it swept everything I knew of myself out to sea.

From this void, something new is emerging. It is, in a sense, his legacy; a love that does not anticipate, does not expect what might be; and that love renews its purpose with each shining day. It is a creative love; it is self-fulfilling.

When my son ceased to be my own I became something else entirely, written out of my own story. Raphael, in the time that has elapsed, has been creating me from the cinders of my broken heart.

The poiesis of motherhood

Friend, we create though that love as that love creates us; we burn in it, it consumes us, and something new is forged from the material of which we once were made. It has a life of its own; it thinks and speak of its own accord, and it loves you back. One day it pursues its own destiny, never to look back.

Friend, we are helpless to resist the love that surges forth, breathing life into our children and our creations alike. We are becoming mothers when we dare to create ourselves through what we offer to the future: the works that may outlive us or burn in obsolescence, the children who may grow to pierce us with their scorn.

Friend, we know nothing of the world our children will inherit: what part they have come here to perform, what has brought them into a human story. And we know nothing, in truth, of the context in which our words are received: we poets are experts at talking into the breeze.

Friend, our willingness to surrender our children to love is what makes us who we are. It is no small miracle that we somehow manage to get through life as we do, attending to its minutiae as our minds soar in the infinite. We receive the gift of inspiration and bestow the gift of love — this is our freedom.

What we make and what we do in this life become gloriously insubstantial once the fact is fully realised that we are what we make and what we do, that we are becoming ourselves through that which we nurture. To create is just our nature; we know ourselves only through what we bestow, and that is why we do it.

Beyond logic and reason, beyond our conceptions of what is possible or not, there is the miracle of love that manifests through ordinary life. The love that seeds visions in our hearts, that offers threadbare moments between the laundry and the toddler mess to commit words to paper.

The opulent power of that poiesis laughs in the face of a Daily Routine, for in the chaos of our lives it unflinchingly asserts its purity.

Friend, this is our gift.

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📚 Catch up on the story so far by downloading the free ebook editions of Surrender Now. 📚