​Is Love All We Need?

     Leaving home, leaving sorrows, but mostly leaving love and lots of beauty, I ventured into the unknown as a young woman in the 70’s. I had robust limbs, vigor, a soft soul for the world, redheaded spunk, and youthful foolishness. I carried a copy of Leaves of Grass, some Emily Dickinson poems, and Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet.

I lived in Los Angeles, traveled to India, Japan, and Hawaii, and lived in Rochester, New York. I was Catholic, Buddhist, evangelical, and a fairy lover until my mid-30’s. So what? Well, this was a considerable feat for a young girl growing up in rural poverty, albeit in a land fecund and majestic. And I’m still a fairy lover.

Sometime around 40, I returned for the first time. I had gone home many times since I left in my 20’s but this was the first time returning with love brimming in my heart for the love and sorrows I had left behind. To confront all and to let the mothering of the land and my family, especially my mother, whom I always carried in a deep pocket of my heart, into my life as I had never done before.

 I laid down in a rocky, refreshing stream and let the waters move over me and through me. It was Catharine’s Creek, off the Catharine Valley Trail in Montour Falls, New York. Little did I know that I had also come home to her, this Iroquois/French Queen Catharine who, like me, could never be separated from the land and the spirit of place. A continual baptism each time I went home.

Birthing a marriage, a daughter, books, including a Catharine novel just released in April 2023, I traveled more than a poor girl from a poor county in New York could have imagined doing – India, Ireland, Italy, all around the U.S., but mostly, I traveled in spirit, in soul, in healing, and returned again and again to my rural roots, my mother, my family, and most recently, Catharine, when I did a book launch on the very site that had been her village in Montour Falls.

Quite a feat for a poor girl with sorrows in her back pack, love in her pockets, and dreams bigger than she had room for. Poor? Really? l had never been poor because love was all I needed and I had had it. The empty bowls of my life were sacred vessels filled with the love of a mother, of her sisters, brother, and others. And Spirit! Love makes the essence of sorrows so sweet, only sips can be taken. Even if the losses cannot be requited, the scars are covered with love.
We can all return home, but it is how we return. Now as I prepare for another trip home to New York at 69 years of age, my mother, two sisters, her brother, and an uncle are no longer there, at least in the flesh. All in fourteen months, they have left this earth, this home I return to.

I’m Alice in Wonderland these days. I don’t like to admit it, but loss, as well as gain (such as a book birthed after I had been in long, long labor with), can do it to you.  

            Stop this moment, I tell you! But she went on all the same, shedding gallons of tears, until there was a large pool all round her about four inches deep and reaching half down the hall….I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night?...But if I’m not the same, the next question is Who in the world am I? Ah, that’s the great puzzle!
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There’s much more to say, but I’ve said enough and wept gallons of tears. Please take the time to listen to this video of a brother and sister, my Uncle Ken Cope and my mother, Doris Cope Havens Filippetti Force Huston, speaking love to one another before they died. My mother, age 94, died in May and her brother, Ken, died in September 2021. He was in a nursing home and Mom was in hospice in her apartment. Note how they say that all that really matters is the love of family. At the end of the video, there are excerpts of Mom playing piano and singing in her 80s. The video was made possible by the lover of a hospice spiritual care counselor Mary Hays.