Things That Love You
Feel the warmth that you miss but is always there to support you
Loneliness, this overbearing, powerful human emotion used to dominate my waking hours during some of the late nights. I felt utterly isolated, even though I just chatted with my loved ones a few minutes ago. The moment we said goodbye, my heart would sink into a dark pit, and my self-pity would flood in like a tsunami.
I would try to reason with myself, “you are not lonely. You are just alone. They are different.” The problem was: I KNEW they were different, so WHY couldn’t I stop feeling this gutting pain in my chest?
Years had passed since the first moment when I learned what loneliness looked like with Depression. I started my healing journey and came across the Poems That Love You newsletter. I had never particularly been drawn to poems in English, likely because I never tried to appreciate this form of literature in this language.
The poem that truly resonated with me for the first time from this email series was called “Priceless Gifts”. It was the 24th poem I received. I never felt what the title of the series promised to deliver — feeling loved by the poems — until I came across this poem:
Priceless Gifts
by Anna Swir
An empty day without events.
And that is why
it grew immense
as space. And suddenly
happiness of being
entered me.
I heard
in my heartbeat
the birth of time
and each instant of life
one after the other
came rushing in
like priceless gifts.
(from Talking to My Body by Anna Swir, translated from the Polish by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan)
I never realized: I could indeed be loved by inanimate objects.
In this context, love becomes a relationship, a perception, rather than a commodity. Less desperate and elusive. More inviting and fluid.
If emotions have temperatures and textures, then I would describe love being cold and hard in the old context, and feeling warm and smooth in the new one, like a stream of warm water.
In the old context, once I finished the conversation with another caring living being, my environment turned cold and hard, void of love. In this new context, whether or not I was accompanied by another loving sentient being, my relationships with my environment stayed warm and nurturing.
Even my relationship with the inanimate objects produced by my body — my breaths, for example — became warm and lively:
“Feel the breaths soothing you, nurturing you.”
— 15 Minute Guided Breathing Meditation for Relaxation and Inner Stillness by Caroline McCready
Even the body itself became my friend — granted, I believe in soul and body being separate. Without a soul, the body is just a meat sack.
Nonetheless, this meat sack is supportive, resilient, helpful — loving, especially when I love it back:
“…feel your body, trillion of cells, supporting you, without you having to do anything.”
— 20 Minute Guided Meditation: Full-body Relaxation and Active Body Scan by Caroline McCready
In a sense, the more I notice how I am being supported and nurtured by my environment outside of my conscious mind, the more I feel connected to these inanimate objects than with some human beings. These inanimate objects don’t fail me when I love them back — when I take good care of them, appreciate our interactions, and honor our relationships.
“Our behavior is not defined by the objects in the environment but by our relationships to them.”
— Atomic Habits by James Clear, p. 87
In this new context, I would say many things of us — our behaviors, temperaments, tastes, moods, outlook — are defined by our relationships to the objects in our environment.
The following are some of the things that I have discovered love me:
The best part of noticing my positive relationships with them is that I start to discover more and more such relationships in my environment — my desk, my kitchen, my room, and my body all of a sudden create a wonderland where I can rest, feel safe and even get stimulated in.
This discovery and realization remind me of this creature in Princess Mononoke — a goat-faced god of the mountain. Every time its foot touches the ground, plants blossom. When its foot lifts off the ground, plants wither.
The cycle of life and death continues always as long as it exists.
I aspire to be like it: so that as long as I exist, my surrounding can always be a wonderland of soulful beings — whether they are animate or not, sentient or not.
