Is God in the details?
Do you fall in love easily?
I am a deeply feeling person and I fall in love all day long. I dearly love the details of life. The way a cloud is shaped or the way the light shines through a plant, revealing the veins in the green. I love little bits of music, the way someone puts a lot of stank on a note, a particular shade of yellow. I love when people wear funny hats or have random bumper stickers. I love stumbling across information that I didn’t know from people whose creations I love- do you know the guys from Vulpeck are worried about grid music taking over the soul of funk? I didn’t know what grid music was, but I do know that I love the way “Back Pocket” makes me feel.
I had two boyfriends in college and I loved them both, like- a lot. The first one, my very first ‘real’ boyfriend, had blonde curly hair that was so beautiful, when I first met him- he was at the wheel of his dad’s boat on a Spring Break in Miami- I genuinely felt like he must have been a son of Poseidon. He loved egg sandwiches on cinnamon raisin bread with fried bologna, played the bass and too many video games, but he was sweet and had the nicest mom other than my own that I had ever met. I’m pretty sure I was more in love with her than him by the time it became apparent it wasn’t working out. She had a whole room of stamps that I helped her organize because I loved her but her son was a liar and that was that. The second guy was very tall, a 5th degree black belt and loved California rockabilly music. He wanted a boatload of tattoos but worried his Southern Baptist parents would disapprove. He had beautiful green eyes and I spent a lot of time going to see him compete in karate tournaments, something I had little interest in but allowed me to finish a lot of books and contemplate what our brown haired blue-eyed babies would look like and how we’d get a ‘57 Chevy and make a karate school empire together. He broke up with me on my birthday and I have to thank him because that heartbreak led me to take the trip that I fell in love with my husband on and the rest is our history, unfolding in real time.
I often wonder why I’m like this. I tuck away details all day long. Friends will often comment about my memory- ‘like an elephant, Jacque- it’s nuts’- probably it is. I can’t help it, nor do I want to. Falling in love with people that don’t love you is the basis for great art, after all. I went to school for creative writing and art history, two of my first loves. My dad thought that was just about the stupidest choice of majors possible, but since I got a scholarship that paid for college I suppose it wasn’t that stupid. I find myself, seemingly a million years from then and several lives lived since college, still writing and still loving art and beauty. We all spend a lot of time “figuring it out”- so much time, right? But now I have four beautiful children who will soon find themselves at the precipice of having to figure things out and I feel deeply that they will. The right things find a way, often not on the timeline we hope for or worse, expect. Am I a curator at a museum? No. I am curating my life in real time, which is perhaps the ultimate creative pursuit.
In the Venn diagram of great loves, my children are diametrically opposed to me- they live on the other side of the circle and the things we love together are laughably small in the middle. I love food and went to culinary school at night for fun after I graduated with my stupid degree. Great swaths of my time are spent researching and reading about new destinations, tucking away details for itineraries I will build based on more things that I love. My kids quite literally hate food and feel like dining out is tantamount to torture. A beautiful menu sings to my soul. It’s almost laughable how much they hate what I love. I am writing this piece from the lobby of one of the most beautiful hotels in the world, The Breakers in Palm Beach. It’s where I come to write and soak in the beautiful work of so many detail lovers- it’s an actual dream. The way the light streams in the big windows casts pleasingly quadrilateral shadows on spectacular rugs. There are just the right amount of plants and floral arrangements so as to allow your eye to rest as it takes in all the things. People wandering by just seem to be unimpressed or unaware of these fantastic gems, but not me. This where my soul comes to recharge, where I am sheltered from being buffeted by unrequited love. My kids don’t need us to love all the same things for them to love me beyond measure and that’s a two way street. I catch myself taking in the details of their faces, the way they laugh, the funny things they say and I am overcome. I am an absolute goner for them and I love it. Loving them informs how I love everything else. Ultimately, someone else will fall in love with their details. I selfishly hope they find someone like me that holds them like little gems in their pocket to be cherished and adored. I don’t need them to love what I love in order to love them. Love is sufficient unto love, as Gibran would say.
God is in the details and people believe less and less in God. I believe more now than I ever did. My creative writing teacher in college once said to me, ‘there will be a time in your life that you have no choice but to write’ and I remember feeling at the time that maybe I didn’t have what it took to be a writer. I find myself at the road she said I would find eventually- I am burning with thoughts. This life is so lonely for deeply feeling and creative people. Do you feel like you are putting messages in a bottle and throwing them into the ocean for someone to read? I do. There are many days that I trend towards nihilistic thought- what matters to people anymore? I feel out of sync- caring deeply about so many things. Feeling very analog in a digital world. ‘How do you have the time?’ I don’t know how you don’t make the time, honestly. I wonder if that is the root of people’s unhappiness- denying what they love? Or perhaps it’s more so realizing that you might be in love with someone who doesn’t love the things you do and you are scared to stand in that harsh light. It’s an evolving thought in my mind as an extroverted introvert. I love to talk to people but find people exhausting. I abhor small talk but I’m excellent at it. I love deep, existential conversation but find most people in my peer group would rather expostulate on the right water bottle. It’s a weird space.
In the time frame of mother of young children and steward of an aging generation, I see clearly the human struggle at all ages to find a tribe. I’ve always thought that my tribe probably doesn’t exist. Personality tests confirm that I’m in some weirdo 2% of the population and that tracks. My husband says I’m pretty black and white but the truth is, I might just be equal parts Care Bear and Stoic, which I guess is sort of the same thing.