Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

I’m officiating a wedding this weekend, for the very first time. And I had no idea how intense the preparation would be. I want to get it just right. One of the things that keeps returning to me, as I write the ceremony, is how much I really believe in taking the risk toward love. I don’t think choosing love is the easy choice, I think it’s brave.

There was a time when I was done with love altogether. I felt like a bird that had flown into the window too many times and then sat up a little stunned and thought, “Oh right, that’s a hard glass window and not air, and if I try to fly into it again I might die.”

I had just broken up with my last boyfriend in Brooklyn. And I wasn’t even grieving as much as I was made numb by the whole thing. Love was stupid. Love was for weak people who didn’t know how to live on their own. I wasn’t weak and I was going to prove it. I was mainly going to prove it by never ever ever falling in love again.

And for a while I was happy. I worked out every morning at the gym, I drank a little less by staying in, I saved some money, I wrote some good poems, and some bad songs on the guitar. I started a band. Then, about a year into this obsession with no love, I realized something. Not only was it not working, the opposite had happened. I missed love more than ever.

I remember once talking late at night with my best friend T. Her ex-boyfriend was visiting from Seattle and we played him a new song I’d recorded and T was talking about the play she was writing, and he suddenly got all excited and said, “Art, art is all that matters!” And we both laughed and said, “No, it’s not.” And he was genuinely stunned by our reply. “What could matter more than art?” he asked. “Love” we both said at the same time. I still believe that’s true.

Today’s essential poem is by the early 20th century poet Elsa Gidlow, who famously came out as a lesbian in her autobiography. In this poem, we see the speaker acknowledge the risk of love.

But we also see her courage to commit to risking her heart again and again, no matter what the consequences.

I, Lover
by Elsa Gidlow

I shall never have any fear of love, 
Not of its depth nor its uttermost height,
Its exquisite pain and its terrible delight.
I shall never have any fear of love.

I shall never hesitate to go down
Into the fastness of its abyss
Nor shrink from the cruelty of its awful kiss.
I shall never have any fear of love.

Never shall I dread love’s strength
Nor any pain it might give.
Through all the years I may live
I shall never have any fear of love.

I shall never draw back from love
Through fear of its vast pain
But build joy of it and count it again.
I shall never have any fear of love.

I shall never tremble nor flinch
From love’s moulding touch:
I have loved too terribly and too much
Ever to have any fear of love.