The Day of Hearts and Flowers💘🌿
Bear with me through the historical destruction as we make our way to love
Is it not possible to eat me without insisting that I sing praises of my devourer?
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Valentine’s Day
On February 14th in 1779, Captain Cook made a bunch of foolish choices and ended up being dismembered by native Hawaiians. He was not, as the story goes, eaten.
See what happened was — it was Cook’s third, and last, voyage and he was trying to find the North-West passage, a space believed to link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Amid this voyage, he happened upon Hawaii, a place that had been so untouched for so long that even the nearby Polynesians had forgotten about the islands.
A festival was happening when Cook’s ship made its way into Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island and it appeared like many people were there to “greet” his arrival.
The Hawaiians believed Cook was the return of the god Lono — a god associated with abundance, putting aside differences and creating time to rest, connect with others, and recover in the winter rainy season. Cook believed the crowds were there to celebrate his arrival, so there was a lot of misunderstanding going on.
Cook hung out with everyone for a month and generally outstayed his welcome, using up limited resources and bringing the gifts of venereal disease and tuberculosis to the previously untouched islands.
After some time one of Cook’s men passed away and the islanders realized that the captain and his crew were mortal. Cook sailed away one month after arrival and the Hawaiians were glad for it.
A day into his departure, one of Cook’s ships was damaged in bad weather. He made a U-turn and returned to Hawaii to make repairs and grab provisions, but the Hawaiians were pretty sick of him and implored him to go away by hurling rocks at his ships as they entered the bay.
In the mayhem that ensued, Cook attempted to kidnap the islander’s king and his men killed a beloved Hawaiian chief. Tensions erupted and finally, Cook stood in knee-deep water unable to make his way back to his ship because he could not swim.
Cook was then killed by the islanders and, believing him to be at least a chief of some status, he was given a warrior’s burial with his bits distributed and his bones put in a sennit casket. His hands and other parts were delivered in a ceremonial cloth to his men on board his ship.
Cook’s men asked, “Did you eat him?”
The islanders were confused and answered, “What? Do YOU eat your dead?”
And that’s how the rumors got started.
On Valentine’s Day, let’s all do our best to really understand what the other person is saying. Let’s not outstay our welcome. And when we’re giving gifts, let’s try to make sure those gifts are wanted.
Miscommunication is a plague that can be easily avoided.
Arrivals
Understanding and being understood is an art, one that extends beyond history and human relationships. This is so apparent as I introduce new horses to our farm and watch them navigate an unfamiliar world, learning who they can trust.
Many animal communicators say that the number one message they get from horses is a constant fear of when they’ll be taken away from their homes and herds and placed somewhere new.
We welcomed two new horses to the farm this week. Acclimating to a new environment is difficult for horses — and if we’re being honest, it’s tough for humans too.
Welcome home, Mocha — and welcome to your new family, Pete. ❤️
Thank you, Lakin, for making this magic happen.
Adjusting to a new place takes time. Some horses settle in quickly, while others take longer to relax, figuring out who they can trust and what feels familiar. People aren’t much different. It’s hard to feel at home when you’re always bracing for the next move, waiting to see if you’re really staying this time.
I used to think love worked the same way—that it was temporary, something you had to hold onto tightly or risk losing — but Christopher has shown me otherwise.
Heart Love
I wrote the piece about Captain Cook, the one you find above, last year when Valentine’s formed a triune and I was on the Big Island of Hawaii. Valentine’s fell on Ash Wednesday and I was with Christopher who made love feel different from other relationships, marriages, and friendships I’d experienced before.
Christopher doesn’t ask anything of me. He just gives. He doesn’t withhold love if I change plans because of a sick horse. In the months following our wedding and Hurricane Helene, being in a vehicle was a chore of vertigo and nausea for me. But Christopher patiently watched me as we traveled, noticing signals that said I didn’t feel well. When it got to be too much he turned around and brought me home to the farm. As we returned, he praised every new mile I’d been able to stand being in the car each week, glorying in wins so small I read them as failures.
Until him, I knew love as transactions that needed my constant tending so I wouldn’t suffer in the red. You know the kind of relationships I’m talking about, the kind where your account is overdrawn and there’s no way to get back to a positive balance because the fees and interest keep adding up.
Love that doesn’t ask for anything in return can be so quiet you miss it at first. If I hadn’t spent my life running to catch up, if I hadn’t worked myself to the bone and was forced to stillness by pure exhaustion, I’m not sure I could have noticed when Christopher showed up with lanterns for me to see in the dark and bags of food to feed me.
I say all this on this day set aside for love because the whole world feels tired right now and is in need of a little compassion. And not the kind that asks for more with thoughts and prayers, but the sort that gives without stopping to ask: what’s in this for me?
Christopher shows me, through action, how to care for others, how to make amends, how to be simultaneously loyal and curious to see all sides.
Loving Christopher has been an education and if patience is a virtue, then Christopher may be the most virtuous man I know, because he waited for me for three decades.
I need lessons in how to be this way, to be more like him, lessons in loving for no reason other than to love, because like most of us, I didn’t have many role models showing me the way through the years, giving me something to emulate into practice. Whenever I ask Christopher where he learned this stuff he says, “Since birth.”
The practice of love is so much easier than practicing piano or studying for a French exam.
It’s so easy, it’s hard.
I had the honor of listening to Reverend Achim Daffin at a memorial service. He said:
There are things that we deliberately do and things that come to us.
Love never ends. Hate is easy. Love is hard.
Grief is the experience of love from the other side.
Love is our best example of what transcends this life.
Like intuition, play, and wonder, love is something we’re born into knowing but lose as our brains develop and we mature into the world. Working a lifetime to get our sense of our forgotten love back is as worthy as launching a career path and, like it, filled with countless opportunities for advancement.
I could talk about love all day.
I used to shy away from it because I’d been led to believe that cynicism and dry humor were signs of a learned mind. We’re taught to believe love’s not worthy of study.
I’m making up for lost years.
Christopher recently secured housing for a mutual friend going through a medical crisis. My first reaction to the news was — Hold on, this person has a sordid past. This person has previously taken advantage of my goodwill. What’s the benefit for us in helping?
I didn’t say this out loud to Christopher though, but I would have not too long ago. Before I spent some time studying Christopher’s altruism in action I would have dug in for an all-out war over why my perspective was right.
I opted instead to stand back and take notes. Christopher had previously encouraged me to forgive this friend and that ended up being the right move.
Christopher spent a day off clearing out a room in his house, sorting through stored things left behind by other people he’d helped.
The friend came over for dinner. We laughed and spoke from our hearts.
There are a thousand ways that helping can go wrong—stories of goodwill soured by expectation, of generosity met with ingratitude. But there are just as many ways that helping can go right, ways I’ve watched Christopher embody and I’m still learning to embrace.
When I sat down last week with Olympic equestrian Kim Walnes for a conversation that will be launching soon on my podcast, she talked about how her horse Gideon asks us to lean into Heart Love:
When you’ve learned to trust what resonates with you and you’ve learned to open the doors to your heart and your gut and your mind, then you may begin to feel, in the presence of another being, an all-enveloping love.
I’m not going to use the word unconditional because Gideon says he doesn’t like the word conditional at all.
It’s a love like being wrapped in warm tenderness and compassion.
He calls this Heart Love.
I’ve spent so much of my life analyzing love, hoping to recognize the sneaky ways it shows up, the ways that don’t declare themselves as grand gestures but hold entire worlds of meaning. It’s been my experience that love reveals itself in the smallest, most ordinary ways — like a broken shower.
How to Love a Writer
Not too long before Christopher told me I was intimidating we gathered for a dinner with friends at my house.
(I wrote about this in our full love story that you can read all ten parts of here.)
Several things happened that day that were notable:
I had jumped off the back of the hay trailer and displaced my kneecap.
A friend had driven quickly into town to escape an unlivable situation.
The shower in the guest room broke.
I was hobbling around on a cane and I was pretty out of my skull with the knee-cap shock. When the guest brought the shower to my attention I just looked at Christopher like — Help!
He went to take a look at it and I hobbled after him.
I parked beside the tub as he fiddled with the knobs.
“What do you think is wrong with it,” I asked.
It was at this point that he turned to look at me and something happened that I’d only read about until then.
I literally got lost in his eyes.
Where I was perched, with my knee outstretched, our faces were close and the unexpected, sudden pull of finally SEEING him was so great that my brain blipped off. I just sat there, stunned/pulled/mesmerized/gaping for a minute.
By the time my brain came back online, I was pulling away because — no, this is your friend, we don’t ruin lifelong friendships with longing. That’s stupid, Kim.
That moment stayed in my mind until my trip to Denver when Christopher came clean with me about my intimidation and his love.
I’ve since learned that his eyes are green but with so many flecks of brown, they look like mocha.
I’ve learned that he is truly the funniest person on the planet and his come-back timing is second to none and someone should give him a prize for witty retorts.
I’ve learned that he is uncannily intuitive and immeasurably kind. I’ve learned that he always tells the truth.
I’ve learned that we can share silence as much as we can share talking and when he does his thing and I do mine, we come back together and gleefully explain what we independently discovered like kids.
I’ve learned that from the time we were twelve until the present moment we have been within miles of each other even when we didn’t know it. The universe has just placed us in the same proximity until we figured it out.
I’ve learned that when I cry he doesn’t force me to justify my sadness. He just holds me and tells me he’s got me.
I’ve learned that he pays attention. He pays attention to everything. He sees things that I just don’t and he guides my gaze to what he sees so I can process the full picture.
Thank you, Christopher. He’s my best friend, my constant, my beloved. We’ve been through some serious shit to get here, but knowing now what the destination was, I wouldn’t have it any other way. Being with him feels like home.
It is home.
He’s the only person that I want to get kicked out of a tsunami museum with or be told we can’t use the dryer after nine PM.
He’s the only person I trust to pass three cars on a curvy road.
He’s the only person that when I ask, “You want to fight?” He says, “Only for air.”
(And try as we might to dig into a good argument, we suck at it because we respect each other’s opinion too much to get defensive.)
He’s the only person I know who will always, inevitably, find a parking space right by the front door — of everywhere.
A lot of people might classify us individually as disagreeable, but we wholly agree with each other.
What do you do when you love a writer? You take her to an open-air bookshop by the water and you understand that she will get lost and you’re patient with her and even kind of like wandering around with her. And when she tells you to stop and take a deep whiff of the air in the store, you do it without question and you even squeeze her hand a little harder when she closes her eyes in pure bliss and says, “Books”
When we spent the day looking for salamanders in the woods and I knew that he loved me but I was so afraid to want anything anymore — I thought something was wrong with me. “I can’t eat and I can’t sleep,” I said. And he laughed. But the next day when I said, “When do I get to see you again?” He showed up minutes later barefoot and feral and ready to wait for me to find him no matter how long I took.
“Come here,” I said.
I didn’t know before him that the breaths between kisses felt like the ocean.
I’m so lucky to have found my person and to have known him all along.
I love you, Christopher.
Thank you.
I trust you.
Now let’s all go out and re-learn love.
Love,
Kim
Field Notes
Read my rebellious love story in ten parts, starting here.
Join me and
(and her First Horse) next week for a conversation on Asking a Different Question. A Zoom link will be arriving in your inbox for my free and paid subscribers.Check out my recent Relatively Stable podcast episodes with Tamar Reno and Jane Pike while I polish up the conversation with Kim Walnes that will launch very soon.
If you live nearby and want to dive into the heart of my farm, Bramblewood Stables, we are currently expanding our volunteer team.
My Stable Roots paid subscriber Zoom meet-up will be Thursday, February 27th.
Click here to help people in the Blue Ridge Mountains recovering from the devastation of Hurricane Helene.
The number one thing you can do for me and for this little farm is to read, listen, comment, share, and subscribe to my little corner of the internet. Let’s make this world a better place together. ❤️
So beautiful, so true. Can’t believe you get Cook’s demise and your love’s awakening into one gorgeous story !