A friend of mine says this – Love First – by way of gentle advice.  What I think she means is that when your heart gets backed into a corner, and you are going over and over your well-reasoned arguments and grievances in your hamster wheel of a head, and still everything feels at an impasse: Love First.

She actually never said it to me, and I’m not sure she’s even said it more than once – but it came to me through another friend who had been helped by it. And such is the power of Love First, that when I heard it, it lodged itself within me, tapping out the shape of a window, a place that might be pushed open.

Which has been a good thing in my world, because it doesn’t take much lately for me to develop short, sharp teeth or feel like my heart has been shoved down into the toes of my shoes.  This is largely because the backdrop of the world has felt especially hard.  Rather, what’s been devastating has been how many people have reacted (or worse, not reacted) to the dumpster fire backdrop of the world, the nation.  It has felt like people don’t care about other people, even and especially the vulnerable, and this has crushed me.  I felt something break in me when the reports came in that children were being separated from their asylum-seeking parents at the border (and still are) and people then actually said, “well, you just can’t trust the news.”  Back when I wrote, “If the protests have you irritated or confused” in the days after the election, I honestly thought that it might help if I put a face on some of the people who felt reasonably afraid (African-Americans, LGBTQ, recent immigrants, ACA-holders, disabled) because candidate Trump had said demeaning and threatening things about them. I didn’t think people’s stories, stories about real people who I love, would change anyone’s political or even ideological belief system – I just thought they might care. That their own beating human hearts might soften towards the human hearts of others in pain with empathy.  … How naïve.

And like a bad boomerang, my disappointment and disillusionment in what has very much appeared like heartlessness from who I would expect to be good people has had the unfortunate effect of hardening my shell.  Writer and thinker Maria Popova says, “the most toxic byproduct of helpless resignation is cynicism — that terrible habit of mind and orientation of spirit in which, out of hopelessness for our own situation, we grow embittered about how things are and about what’s possible in the world… In its passivity and resignation,” Popova says, “cynicism is a hardening, a calcification of the soul.”

I’d been searching for something to soften this calcification when I remembered my friend’s reminder: Love First.

To me, Love First does NOT mean telling the racists down the block to come over for a game of Scrabble. It doesn’t mean accepting or agreeing to what I deeply feel harms another.  What it means to me is that I have to stay plugged in to the undercurrent of love that flows through us, and around us, all. I have to stay focused on that – first and foremost – for my own good.

Love First is finding a way out when it seems impossible — when everything is enormous, including your own pain and sense of injustice, and the only opening is the size of a quarter.  We forget, I think, what the heart can do. We forget that the heart is like that amazing giant octopus, Inky, who made an incredible break for freedom a couple of years back by squeezing himself out of a small hole in his enclosure at the National Aquarium of New Zealand, slooshing across the floor, and escaping through a drain pipe no bigger than 4-inches to make it back out to open waters. (It’s worth mentioning that a less independence-minded octopus, Blotchy, remained behind).

It’s like Inky, the heart – without bones, without limits, able to shift and squeeze, finding its way out to a bigger ocean.

Often, for me, I can only do this a great distance – and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. In fact, I think it’s probably right and wise to protect ourselves in this way, when needed. We can love greater, in many cases, at a bit of a distance, rather than pressed up against each other’s grills and windshields. I have an aunt who’s seriously mentally ill, and her illness has tragically distorted her reality so much so that it is not just toxic, but dangerous to be around her, or even in communication.  So in my little tiny flawed efforts to try out this Love First business last week, the most I could do was light a virtual gratitude candle for my aunt and wish her well, silently from the across the country.  But in this small action, a giant anvil lifted.

With another relationship, I’ve been trying to Love First by stopping the rehearsing of arguments in my head, playing out endless scenarios – and replacing it with a memory of a great laugh we shared not too long ago.  And if I’m too frustrated or angry to do that, I go father back – to when this friend helped me when I was moving out to LA with my then boyfriend, now husband, and had little support or resources and she pressed an envelope of cash into my hands and told me I was always a great investment. I can usually get to Love First in this way.

I think Love First might mean often having to go back farther and farther and farther, however far it takes, until we can see some common denominator. Same species, if nothing else.  This might be less about a reconciling (which might never happen) than a dropping down to a bigger love of some subterranean river that we are all a part of – and saying, “Okay, I belong to that.”

No one has to know, there are no fireworks or Facebook posts or even phone calls.  But we know. It’s so subtle, and so profound. Love First.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m new at this and abysmal at it for the most part. Most of the time I feel like Blotchy, stubbornly stuck in the tank and thinking – “DAMMIT that looks scary and hard.  And why doesn’t anyone ever help me? Or see how hard I work? Or appreciate my interesting spots? When the hell is it feeding time already?”  (Oh Blotchy, I SO get you).

If cynicism is a hardening, a calcification – then Love First is a stretching of the ligaments.   For me, it’s a rejection of my flat-present day snapshot that people don’t care, and a reaching of my tentacles towards something greater, something better and more loving and inclusive. It’s the aperture of what I see reflected in the open faces of my children.

It’s Inky, busting out through the filter vent and bonelessly contorting through the pencil-sized drain so that he could be a part of the ocean again, so that he might be a part of the bigness and connectedness of himself.

My aunt doesn’t know – and won’t ever know –  I lit a candle for her. Sadly, we will probably never speak again. My friend doesn’t know I have to meditate on her previous generosity before reaching out to her.  Another loved one doesn’t know how much I focus on the river of love that flows between us, when I invite her over, whether or not she accepts (and she usually doesn’t). And who knows how many people need to do this with me? None of that actually matters, because my heart has squeezed through one of those cool bookcase secret passageways. It’s escaped and lightened, when I can manage this.

In this way, I don’t think Love First is an action, it is actually an internal migration. A shift in the way we think of our immobile, set firmament and introduction of a little fluidity.  It’s an inside job, is what I’m saying.

It’s our soul — at last and through the smallest of openings — finding the ocean again.