Kate Bowler:
Love and fear have this very strange relationship. The more we love, the more afraid it could make us. Like, congratulations, you had a baby. Now you’ll never sleep peacefully again. Or, another birthday, wonderful. Now you can have a brand new nightmare of all of the terrible things that could happen to everyone you love. I’m Kate Bowler and this is Everything Happens. And today may be one of my very favorite conversations of all time. And it is because it is with someone who tells the truth about the absurdity of love and fear, the way they tangle together in everyday life. In parenting, in friendships, in grief and anxiety, in dog calendars. Yes, dog calenders. So if you ever thought, wow, loving people is amazing, and also help, I’m a wreck, this one is for you. Katherine Newman writes the kind of books that make you laugh through your tears. She’s the author of memoirs like Catastrophic Happiness and Waiting for Birdie and breathtaking novels like We All Want Impossible Things, Sandwich, and her latest Wreck. Her writing appears in places like No Big Deal, The New York Times, Real Simple, O Magazine, and on her substack, Chrome Sandwich. She lives in Massachusetts where she does all of the important things like writing and making dinner. And loving her people. Catherine, I feel like this is our long lost reunion and I’m so tired to just look at your face.
Catherine Newman:
I feel the same.
Kate Bowler:
I think one of the things that feels so familiar about you, you live in a friendly world in which I understand. And I think part of it is your stories hold up a mirror to these ordinary, impossible lives. And I’ve heard you say that fiction allows you to be more honest, which feels maybe counter-intuitive to some people. How is it that fiction could make you, perhaps, more truthful?
Catherine Newman:
Hmm. Even in memoir, if you’re committed to telling the truth only about yourself, other people are constantly implicated as I know you know. And it’s so hard to do well without either straying into untruths or diluting things because of other people’s feelings at play. Or maybe there was something fundamental I didn’t understand about how to do it that I feel with fiction like, whatever the true feeling is about something, I can just get at it without a lot of delicacy, I should say.
Kate Bowler:
So I do like wonder how often, even when we’re telling our stories to friends, how much we’re like polishing up our lives in order to give everyone a story that they can live with.
Catherine Newman:
That’s an intense question, right? Like what I always want is to hand everyone like mayhem on a platter, you know? Like here, us two, it’s a disaster. Like, you know, I’m sitting on a Maxi-Pad the size of a crib mattress, whatever. Whatever gross, terrible thing, I always wanna just give it all. And then I… I hate the idea that I would do the opposite of give somebody some impossible norm, like, anybody needs more of that, you know?
Kate Bowler:
I will never forget listening to this dearly departed grandmother who got up on her 70th birthday and we were all at this restaurant. We’re down this big long table and we’re all sitting around and she decided to present her life story. And I was like moved and then like a little confused. And then I wasn’t quite sure. And by the end I was like, this woman is a liar. It’s wild sometimes, even just how often we repeat, we repeat for ourselves the story that we imagine. And it really does take, I think for all of us, like a moment of separation to say, no matter how many times I’ve repeated this—Is this true? Oh my god!
Catherine Newman:
It’s so real and that thing that’s like the wedding toast or the eulogy where you’re sitting there like, really, that’s not how I remember, I was there. And my parents like to tell this story about how I went to sleepaway camp and I was really unhappy and then I loved it. That’s not a true story. I was unhappy until the bitter end. I wrote a letter home every day that was like, come and get me. I’m dying. I’m like dying of unhappiness. I cried myself into like a drowning puddle. Like, it doesn’t end well. It’s not good narrative, you know, it’s like a boring flat line. But like, that’s the true story. You know, it’s not the story with the good narrative arc where then they came. The story they tell, they came and I was like why are you even here? That’s not true! I was lying like under the tent crying probably when they came, but that, you know, that way that it can make you feel like a liar or lied about. And then whoever is hearing that story or reading it is like, oh, everything has to follow this narrative arc where everything’s fine all the time. And it’s—
Kate Bowler:
One of the things I admire most about you and about your, like the profession of, of like writer and novel writer is when we can live inside of a story for a long time in a way that it can carry us like a boat further than we could swim. And I, I felt that way reading We All Want Impossible Things. Tell me a bit about the novel itself and the world of those characters.
Catherine Newman:
So my best friend of like a billion years died of ovarian cancer 10 years ago this year. And we’ve been friends since we were three.
Kate Bowler:
Oh, I love you.
Catherine Newman:
Yeah, right, the fucking worst. And it was this amazing, amazing experience, which is such an odd thing to say about, like the experience of someone else suffering and dying. But anyways, I was kind of blown apart, crazily in love with the world during this time. I just was in love her and I was in love with her family and I was in love with everyone who came into her room at the hospice, like this feeling of—I don’t know if it was like the blown openness of grief or this way that, I mean, I am talking to the person who invented talking about this—but the way that… a feeling that days are numbered.
Kate Bowler:
Your hand gesture, what I see is like that crystalline quality of life, and then it feels precious and paper color.
Catherine Newman:
Yes, all of that even though I know that can put a lot of pressure on you and it can backfire and feel awful. I luckily had this experience of distilled purpose and beauty and this feeling of—like, right. We don’t know how long our lives are. Like there really is just this moment with this person and I was so in love with everybody. And at some point I said to her husband like, if I ever write about this, I want it to be a novel where the main character is sleeping with everybody. Cause that’s what I felt like and I wasn’t—I need to say that like mostly cause nobody asked. I mean, I swear I would have, I have no idea. My boundaries were insanely porous at this time. Like I was—such a crazy thing to say. No, I was like just wide open. But that, weirdly—
Kate Bowler:
I’ve never heard anyone say that but the other day I was talking about my friend and chemo. I was in a different city and I was trying to explain—I was like, yeah, and then I met this woman at the airport and this really needed help and I bought her pants. Like it devolved, but it’s exactly that. I was cracked open and like in love with the world and also kind of insane.
Catherine Newman:
The pants buying for a stranger—that I know. She was dying in Coney Island and so like you would go out to one of the Russian markets and everyone would talk to you with really—you’d go like buy a cup of borscht as one does when their best friend is dying in hospice and everyone would be like, “Hey baby,” you know, with some heavy Russian accent and I would be like, oh my God, go home with me. Like, I just felt shattered. Anyways, so I wrote a novel where the only way I felt like I could get at this thing, or maybe not the only way, but the best way, was this fictionalized thing that had to do with representing somebody’s crazy boundaries during grief and love.
Kate Bowler:
That gorgeous—
Catherine Newman:
Mania. Gorgeous mania.
Kate Bowler:
When we live inside a world and we’ve lived in it with someone, did you feel like you sort of learned to inhabit—like you were visiting another planet and then you started to kind of colonize it in your own way?
Catherine Newman:
Hospice. Yeah. Oh my god. Yes. And what an amazing way to put it. It’s the same like when Michael and I lived in California and our really close friends there had a baby and we went up for the birth and then we stayed for 10 days. And then we came home and I was like, what is this? What is all this stuff that’s not this, like, rarified—I don’t know, like perfect timeless experience of similar like life and death, the purpose and meaning. You never were like, oh, is this the best way I could be spending my time? I’m filling an ice bucket for my dying friend. Like what else would I possibly do? Yes, totally. Yes, a colonized planet, absolutely. Like it’s so—it’s terrible, it’s like the worst thing, but it’s also so incredibly special and meaningful.
Kate Bowler:
Marrow of the universe feeling—yes. I always—I mean, I really hate hospital days and I have to have them in piano—it’s more like maintenance or stuff—about four months or so. But there is, when I can settle in for a second, I can feel it again. But then I am—there is a quiet to it in the middle of the fear and then I am in love, then I’m just in love. And it’s one of the only places where I can be as—
Catherine Newman:
Spiritually quiet. And like for you, I must be so—I don’t know, you must have such an awareness of this life-givingness of this thing, even though it’s taken so much from you. Yeah, that’s just—wow, that is such a good way of putting it.
Kate Bowler:
It—though—because just picturing you volunteering in hospice, like one of the things I feel most emotional about when someone else is there is the way that they will—like a cool cloth on the hair, the feeling of a hand—right? And that to me, that feels like it feels divine because you can’t do it for yourself.
Catherine Newman:
It’s so divine, it’s so true, like anointing and the grace. It’s incredible. I mean, hospice, you know, when you tell people like at a party, they think, oh, what do you do for fun? I volunteer in hospice. And it sounds like so noble. And some of it is the rarefied, anointing—washcloth or literally holding someone’s hand who is struggling, you know, to be shepherded into the next thing—it’s so intense. And then some of it is so mundane and awful, like really not that at all—like the opposite.
Kate Bowler:
It’s equal parts disturbing and awe-inspiring, and it does sound like intermittent.
Catherine Newman:
And a little of that, and also just awkwardness, which is such an odd thing. I got called to sit vigil, which is when someone has asked that they not die alone. And so volunteers are summoned to just come and be a body in the room if that person’s people aren’t around or there aren’t people available in that person’s life. Like, I was patching a pair of jeans. I gathered that up. That’s the right kind of activity, right? You don’t wanna be on your phone—like an asshole—with a full scrapbooking project and a little guillotine. Like, you need something like knitting, knitting—something to do that leaves you like sort of spiritually available, but you’re not just boredly watching somebody being like, come on, get on it. But I showed up and this person—I walked into the room with my needlepoint—and this person was sitting up in bed awake, which I hadn’t expected.
Catherine Newman:
I thought she was going to be sleeping. “Hi.” I ended up making horrible, like nervous small talk with her. And I hated myself more for it. And I wasn’t new, like I’d been at this hospice for five years. And somehow I was thrown off guard. I asked her if she had a Malamute-a-day calendar with like—every day had a different Malamute, like all these dogs, these white fluffy dogs. I like made chit chat with her about—she’s literally dying and I’m like, “Hey did you have a Malamute, like tell me about it,” and the whole time I was like, what’s wrong with you, still yourself down. Like she’s awake—she’s not like standing in line at the post office—just chill out. And I had the weirdest energy. And then this other volunteer came to spell me. The woman did not say, “Oh, thank God,” but like really close to it—was like, “Oh, I’m so glad to see you.” And I was like, oh, what a nightmare. I left my bag and I had to go back in. And when I went back in, the new volunteer was sitting, holding her hands. Completely quiet. And I was like, I just needed to be present. I didn’t need to entertain somebody. But that you could like hook up the last hours of somebody’s life just by being a flawed—like, jerk. It’s so horrible, it was so horrible. I went home, I told my family over dinner—I was crying and laughing—and my kids were like, “Oh my god, Mama, that is so…” And the weird thing is, then she didn’t die, and I went back and had an opportunity, actually, to be normal and quiet. But I don’t know if this is a story about trying to steady yourself, or it’s just a story about just being so flawed, and even the most important things, not showing up properly for them. It’s just really life, right?
Kate Bowler:
It’s funny, I was just—my very favorite chemo nurse in the whole world came to—we still hang out and she’s so great, her name’s Meg, and she looks like a little baby Anne Hathaway. But what’s amazing to me is that she remembers—I don’t know how—she remembers all my appointments. And she’s like, “Remember when this person came in? Remember this person who came in?” But it was such a lovely—because I was, you know, you’re in and out of being able to observe your own situation—and it was her. Like—two of one year straight, but really over two years, and it was every two or three weeks. It was, it was very fun because I realized what we were doing is saying, do you remember this person—thank you so much, what a nightmare. Do you remember this person—what a gift that they’re just needed. Do remember? And it was, it was a reminder for me of like, man, how can I learn to be a little bit more like the person. Yeah!
Catherine Newman:
A catalog of, like, grief.
Kate Bowler:
We’re going to be right back after a break to hear from our sponsors. Don’t go anywhere. You write: Everyone dies, and yet it’s unendurable. There is so much love inside of us. How do we become worthy of it? And then, where does it go? A worldwide crescendo of grief sustained day after day, and only one tiny note of it is enough. I love the image of this feeling like grief and suffering and all this is so universal and yet we carry the particularity of love in such like minute details.
Catherine Newman:
So true and it’s the greatest like avenue—as everyone knows—to compassion. It’s just, it’s like the most basic fact, but it’s—yeah, like the way you love your kid is the way everyone in the world loves their kid. Like that way it’s the most special thing and everyone has it and it is immediately connective—like you immediately know how most of the world feels.
Kate Bowler:
They even did like an experiment where they could put plants in elder care facilities. Anyone just watching everyone be like, “Oh, I just love my plants so much.” We love what we take care of. We just love them. Oh my God.
Catherine Newman:
That’s so true, that’s so real. That’s not what I thought you were going to say. Pet rock phenomenon of the 1980s. I did not love that rock. I kind of loved my rock. I knew it was a rock.
Kate Bowler:
Your latest novel, Wreck, has a certain flavor of love and it is driven by this kind of anxious quality. The main character, Rocky, has this toggling between past and present and future—fears for kids and fears for aging dad and fears for her health. And I wonder what you—it’s like you have an argument there and I really like—what do you want to say? What do you think you’re saying about the anxious vigilance of love that doesn’t ever really shut up?
Catherine Newman:
What a profound question for me. Like, does it serve a purpose, and am I making a case for it—and certainly not making a cause for it? Like, I am medicated. I am trying to do it better. But, it’s funny—I had this, I mean parenting, dot dot dot. Like all the cliches, you become a parent and then you think about all the things either your parents have said to you or parents in TV shows have said to their kids of like, “Oh, I wish it were happening to me,” or all that stuff that’s so—I’m sure, like your mom. Oh, you know what my dad said?
Kate Bowler:
He said, “Oh, sweetie, if I could do anything to take this cancer away, I would take it onto me.” And then it was a little silence. And he said, “But then I remembered that Mozart died by your age.” And then I’m like—and then he did like a weighing-things-in-both-hands gesture. I mean, Mozart! No less a genius than Mozart! Look at historical—down. You’re like, “Oh, I respect that dying young, whilst not ideal.”
Catherine Newman:
So I have been this person who has this like, you know, a lot of preemptive grief and a lot of present anxiety and when our daughter—she went through like a mental health crisis in middle school and the beginning of high school—like she’s great now and is okay with me like talking about it. Let’s see. She’s 22 and it’s just like living her absolute best life, which I just will put there also as a note in case anyone feels like this chapter is the only chapter. There are so many other chapters coming. It’s one chapter, it ends. And I just should say, I carried this—like, it was just this like rock and I went through my life just carrying it and the rock was her sorrow. Her unhappiness. And I just brought it everywhere with me. I woke up in the morning and could tell from my bed what her mood was. At some point recently she said, like I could lay it down a little cause you were holding it.
Kate Bowler:
Oh, that’s lovely.
Catherine Newman:
And I truly had no idea. I thought I was holding it somewhat pointlessly, but I just couldn’t put it down, you know? Like, I didn’t think it was useful to be so—but it was like a little relieving. Like, someone was in it with you and you could like lay a little of it down, you know? Anyway—all that worry was luckily— I mean, I don’t know. Hypervigilance—it’s such a beast and I have been so truly, I think, ill with it and didn’t even realize—like I thought that was just what parenting was. And yeah, I don’t—I just don’t know what to think anymore. So the way Rocky in the book has this preemptive grief that is like the drumbeat that’s always in the background for her—it’s just how I am. I mean, the only thing I can say about it is it does—there is a certain sparkle of the fleetingness. And I do feel it. My dad is 93. He’s like one of my favorite people in the world. And I’m with him and I have this feeling the whole time I’m with him that’s like a parenthetical feeling of like, he’s 93. Like these are numbered days—as all days are. They all are. But it just feels very focusing for me. So maybe another case for hypervigilance. It’s very good and important to be sort of—
Kate Bowler:
Oh my gosh, I’m always going to be a dread. Get over it. You’re very funny. And I think there’s like—there’s such a—you relish the absurdity of that strange, ugly-cry place. But I know that other people, when they realize the precarity of the universe, their counterbalance is like, “Ah, beauty, go to an art gallery.” Mine goes to absurdity. Mine goes to—like that it somehow gets funnier and funnier, right? I just wonder what it is that makes grief this incredible companion to comedy, but it’s like in me. I feel the same.
Catherine Newman:
Yeah, I feel like culturally, it’s—you know, my dad’s Jewish. Like, I definitely grew up with, like, humor as the antidote to the shtetl. Like, it certainly was drummed into me that like, you know, you would make like a good joke on the way to the morgue or whatever. But I don’t know. I do feel absurdity. It’s funny to talk to you about it because I think absurdity is exactly what it is, but I’m just realizing I think—
Kate Bowler:
—it might be. I think it’s because it’s the closest I get to—like when everything comes apart and everything can’t possibly be reconstructed in a meaningful way, right? Like what can possibly account for this loss? What can possibly make fair this—the brokenness of this world? Yeah, I creep very close—as all good despair does—to nihilism, to like nothing matters. And I think absurdity is right up close to “nothing matters,” but it doesn’t actually cross over that line. It just says, isn’t this entirely upside down and inside out? Wow. So it’s like the last—
Catherine Newman:
Exit.
Kate Bowler:
Yeah, no, and naturally you get off before Brooklyn.
Catherine Newman:
Yeah, I think. And it holds everything at once, which is of course all we need to do all the time—I mean, the everythingness of it all, the grief and the humor and the love and the fear—and just to somehow like hold those things together, which I do feel like the absurd kind of maybe does a little bit.
Kate Bowler:
Because awe or whatever—they hold something, but to me you’re right, it doesn’t hold the range.
Catherine Newman:
It has the range. I do think the everythingness—like for me, you know, I’m a little ahead of you in terms of age, but not in terms of sort of lived life. Like, I feel like you’re like—you’ve precipitously—
Kate Bowler:
I’ve been middle-aged this whole time.
Catherine Newman:
For me, like my 50s—I mean, I had to live 50 years before I could hold everything and see that that was actually the goal: not to decide on like, this is good, or this is bad, or like, this is the part of my life I want and that’s the part I don’t want. Like, you just—I mean that’s the name of your show, it’s like everything. It’s not each thing, you know. It’s like if your show were called—
Catherine Newman:
“Each Thing Happens.” And then show by show, I’m like, today’s dog. Tomorrow is compadre. I just feel like that would have such a different vibe.
Catherine Newman:
Like, each thing happening, we kind of deal with the thing that’s hard.
Catherine Newman:
Is the everythingness of all of that.
Kate Bowler:
Oh my gosh, you’re ex—We’re going to take a quick break to tell you about the sponsors of this show. We’ll be right back. If I could just put in some formal objections with the divine authority—but there’s just some notes I have about how love works.
Catherine Newman:
Yeah. Yes. I mean, I guess mine—
Kate Bowler:
Oh my gosh, cause even just my son listening to my son discover how love feels. We were leaving my parents’ house and we all get to leave, which—of them—and we just miss them so much, and there’s all the aging parents stuff. And then my son goes, “It just feels like the better I get at this love thing, the worse I feel.”
Catherine Newman:
That’s—
Kate Bowler:
That’s the loudest thing, because you wrote—and I wrote this down, but you’re powerful—you wrote, “Is it better to have loved and lost? Ask anyone in pain and they’ll tell you no. And yet, here we are, hurling ourselves headlong into love, like lemmings off a cliff into a churning sea of grief. We risk every last thing for our heart’s expansion, even when that expanded heart threatens to suffocate us and then burst.” That is so real. And it really reminds me of that bell hooks quote, something like the practice of love—like there is no safety in love.
Catherine Newman:
Yeah, cause loss is just the precondition of it. Just is, it’s just always riding along.
Catherine Newman:
Although when I said it, I pictured something romantic, but then when I said it—I pictured like some horror movie where you think you’re driving away from the murderer who’s like hanging—hanging on to the back. To me just like that—it’s always riding along.
Kate Bowler:
Totally. Yeah, look in your rear view mirror. Love that. Yeah—there it is.
Catherine Newman:
I know it. I guess that’s like our job is just to live with that. Or like, I was saying the other day that we had spent some time with my parents and they’re having a hard moment—and asterisk, understatement—and it’s really beautiful and really hard to be with them in the way of hard and beautiful things. And I love them so much and we were—and I said, I think I’m just gonna ghost them. Like I think I’m done. I think the part that worked really well for me was when they took care of me and were like sturdy and this part is not working as well. And just as our relationship evolves, I’m just feeling like I’ve kind of grown out of the whole thing really. I just—I was like, of course completely kidding, but I had that feeling of like, drive away. Never return. It’s too hard, which I have always had. It is so scary. I would like go to the bathroom when my friend was in hospice and be like—I’d see the door and be like, go. Leaving is a possibility. That feeling of tethering yourself to certain grief—it is so hard.
Kate Bowler:
Yes, we were like, you know, “I think about whether this is still good for me. You guys used to do more stuff for me, and that was really great. That part was great. This part…” I think it’s so challenging.
Kate Bowler:
That’s really funny. That’s good. It’s really so real, so relatable. It’s so real. You write a lot about parenting and there’s this great—one of my very best friends is Jessica, who’s a priest on this show—and we just, she had this little pumpkin of a baby recently. And the line we both realized that we love so much in Wreck is about parenting, saying, “My besottedness with her feels like a gift or an affliction or both.” Right? Don’t you feel that? So real—like the ache it creates. I feel it every single night when I’m like praying with my son and we have this cute little moment. We love very unvarnished prayers, but we’re like, “Dear God, today my friend was a real loser,” and it was so funny. We get into it. And God’s like, do tell. Well, they’re very dishy prayers. I love it. We have lots of notes just to share, but there’s this strange, wonderful feeling about kneeling down and feeling the love at the exact same time. And it so intimately connects for me that feeling of being loved by God, but also this—like, this crazy, aching insanity that I’m trying to pour into roughly 85 pounds. Right, without smothering or being in nature. Yeah, I’m not a big pillow over your face. I’m the pillow under your head.
Catherine Newman:
I know. I think that’s like just a great mystery—what that even is, that feeling—but I know exactly what you mean, the ache of it. You know, it’s like the ache your son is feeling about leaving your parents and there’s not—it’s hard to even—I don’t know. I think about it, you know, the way—you can say something really stupid. You’ll see this when he’s older, because especially with older kids, because you can’t just like scoop them up, obviously. So you’re stuck with this really limited palette of like acceptable ways to express how much you love them.
Kate Bowler:
See, you hear yourself say things like, “I really like your shirt.” Yeah, I like that utterance.
Catherine Newman:
That utterance needs to contain like this absolutely ineffable adoration. But I can’t get it into any language that makes any sense and I can’t express it physically, and I’m just stuck saying this stupid shit to the kids that must just drive them crazy. You know, “I like your hair like that.” Now I think about like my mom saying stuff like that to me and she meant like, “Oh my God, I love you so much, I’m going to die. I could literally fall down to the ground and die.” And instead it’s like, “Oh, do you want me to iron your pants?”
Kate Bowler:
Oh my gosh, we make fun of my mom—my poor sweet mom—so much about this because sometimes you can tell she feels so overwhelmed by love of something sad that’s happening in the room that then she will immediately, I think, accidentally divert it to something unbelievably dumb—said respectfully of her mom. But, for example, we’ll be like—me and my sisters talking, laughing, and joking—All of a sudden my mom is like, “Girls, girls. Girls, just one—I just want you to know, we have three kinds of apples.” You could just tell that she’s like, I love you. I will provide for you. I’d like to inventory this fridge for you. “Here’s what there is—apples.”
Catherine Newman:
No, I really am becoming that—I see how it happens. I feel like little kids, like you scoop them up and you like bite their meaty little shoulder and you kiss on their face and you just have these ways to express your love and then they’re in their twenties. “There’s Macintosh, then Rayburn, there’s one Fuji. You guys could split it if you all want it. I could cut it up.” It’s really—it’s just really the worst. I feel so embarrassed all the time. They come home for like a minute and I have filled the fridge with things they like, but I try to be casual about it and not mention it because I don’t want them to be depressed. You know, I don’t want them to picture my whole life being like, “They’re coming over—one day I’ll shop for a month.” Like that’s so grim and horrible. I just don’t want to depress them or make them feel like—
Catherine Newman:
—sorry for me.
Kate Bowler:
I’ve been thinking a lot about joy because I’ve been reading about it and researching it. And just, I love thinking about joy. And so it made me want to ask you, have you been like surprised by joy at all lately?
Catherine Newman:
I’m like a real contentment person. Like my favorite emotion is contentedness. And I don’t know if that’s because, like, I was supposed to hate joy with fear. Sorry! Here’s your last question! I’m supposed to be like, “Yeah, I used to really—” And instead I went like—yeah, like a raw, like an amusement park ride. Like, I don’t really know. I think I really love—like very—my favorite thing is to feel really safe and really loved. And that’s like, both kids are home. We’re in bed with them and the cat’s looking at like somebody’s saved TikToks. And I feel like this is the perfect moment of my whole life.
Kate Bowler:
Catherine, I will not lie to you. Meeting you was completely worth it. It’s 10 on 10, friendship scores. It just—if you just had—if there was a dive-in competition right now, I’d just be holding up a 10. C.S. Lewis once wrote, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you wanna make sure of keeping it intact, you must give it to no one, not even an animal,” not even a Malamute. Okay, he didn’t really say that last part, but like you, you beautiful people, that’s one of the things that makes this audience so lovely. We are just not people who keep our hearts to ourselves. We will love and then keep on loving despite fear, despite anxiety, despite everything we can’t control, despite all that we will lose. I just want to say if you feel weird as that kind of person, just think you are an absolute delight. And we’re here to celebrate all that love and courage that it takes to stay and to bear witness to the ordinary and absurd. And if we’re very lucky, that feeling of gorgeous magic. In the spirit and the love of Catherine, who was just like an absolutely spectacular human being, I thought we could do a little blessing for when love makes us afraid.
Blessed are you, looking at the miracle, the surprise before your eyes, the kid that you prayed for, the relationship you hoped would come, the feeling of family you get when you’re all together, that chest-expanding, heart-bursting, time-please-slow-down kind love. The kind of love that really you would prefer to roll in bubble wrap, thank you very much. Just to protect them a little longer from the harshness of this world and our helplessness to keep them safe. It is a wonder that so much love makes us so afraid. Blessed are we who remember this strange equation, that with so much we have that there is so much to lose. Grant us gratitude for the villages who make us feel less alone, and the needs we cannot meet, the guarantees we cannot make, the futures we can’t predict. Grant us the practice of presence to count eyelashes, squeeze in another bear hug, linger in the doorway a little longer, because yes, the days are long, but the years are short, and that is what this moment offers us. Grant us the wisdom to show them the world in its wonder and tragedy, its brokenness and splendor, where joy and sorrow somehow coexist. And grant us courage for when we have to let go—of the fear, of the worry, of the hands we long to hold—knowing, trusting that our loves and our worries are held together by someone greater still.
Oh, my darlings, this was just one of my favorite conversations that made me so happy. And if you want any more blessings, reflections, thoughts and feelings, hilarious anecdotes, I’m on Substack and it is truly my favorite representation of this beautiful community. I get to see all of your comments and the discussion around this and it really just makes me believe that the world is good. So if you want to find that little corner of the Internet, it’s kateboehler.substack.com and it’s just—I can’t wait to see you there. And hey, if you don’t mind leaving us a review on Apple or Spotify, it would really help more people find us. And if you want to see my face, which right now I have very long hair, come find me on YouTube, where you can watch every episode. I’m at Kate C. Bowler.
Everything happens, and everything happens with help from Jessica Ritchie, Harriet Putman, Keefe Weston, Anne Herring, Hailie Durrett, Megan Crunkleton, Anna Fitzgerald-Peterson, Elias Zonio, and Katherine Smith. This is Everything Happens with me, Kate Bowler.
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