What struck me the most when I watched this interview for the first time and continues to bite me every time I hear it is her agreement with death. Angelou seems to have wrestled herself out of her mere mortality, out of being something that death happens to, and is instead an active participant in the conversation with death. Death will not merely one day overtake her, but is something with which she has made an arrangement. She posits death as her equal and negotiates something of a truce. Sure, she will let herself die, but first she will live. This latter part–the living–follows from the agreement: since she has agreed that she will die, everything else in life that she might attempt is “something lesser.” Failure, “lesser.” Embarrassment, “lesser.” Heartbreak, “lesser.” And so she says, “I will try.”

What then for us? Can we too reach an agreement with death? Sit at the table across from it, stare into its cold, dark eyes, and say I see you and I agree that one day I will let you have me. In my experience, most of us are unwilling to take the seat at that table. We think that by avoiding the conversation we can avoid the reality of our human limitations. But Dr. Angelou asks us to consider that death’s power comes not from the conclusion it forces us to encounter, but from our fear of grappling with it.

Around the same time that I watched the interview that surfaced this conversation with Dr. Angelou, I was also reading When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalinithi. The book is a near-end-of-life memoir written by a neurosurgical resident who discovers that he is dying of brain cancer during his last year of residency. The irony of the doctor saving others from that which he cannot save himself is nearly too cutting. It is one of the most gut-wrenching books I’ve ever read. Paul writes at one point that he thought he would be a neurosurgeon and then become a writer after he retired, but as it turned out, life, or rather death, would force him to become one and not the other. The writing itself is brilliant, nearly poetic. It brings the reader directly into Paul’s conversation with death and the way in which it forced him to make sense of his life. What actually matters? How much does our career merit in the end? When is achievement personally meaningful and not just another brass ring? Does it matter if you know that you will die tomorrow? Next week? Next year? What does it mean to love in the near presence of death?

As I closed When Breath Becomes Air, tears already streaming down my face out of empathy for Paul’s wife and child, Kalinithi and Angelou pressed into dialogue. I could hear Kalinithi asking, “What should I do?” And Angelou responded with her knowing smile, “You should live.”

“But I’m dying,” Kalinithi uttered.

“So are we all. You should therefore live even more,” the Angelou in my mind’s eye retorted.

And as I watched the two in metaphorical dialogue, I felt their gaze turn to me. Suddenly, my shoulders lifted near my ears, my heart pumped faster, and the alarm bells in my head rang out a five-alarm fire: “I’m going to die!” Panic!

Slowly, the air returned to my lungs, shallow at first, but deeper with each inhale. “I’m going to die.” I let the words wash over me like waves meeting shore. “I’m going to die.” I repeated the sentence, emphasizing a different word each time. First, “I’m.” Then, “going.” Then, “to.” And finally, “die.” And so began my own approach to death’s table. I sat down to negotiate my own truce.

In the days and weeks that followed, I vacillated between, on the one hand, wanting to shake every person I love and yell in their face “we’re going to die” as some actor inevitably does in every apocalyptic movie the moment before the first massive strike, and on the other hand, grappling with what it means for everything to be “something lesser.” I spun out loss after loss, pain after pain, fear after fear, all something less than death. Finally, I came to Angelou’s declaration of life: “I will try.” That declaration landed on me now as more of a challenge: why not try? If all of the fear, pain, and despair is less than death, then why not try for all of it? The deep, robust, meaningful life? The purpose-driven career? The hopeful future for a better world? The once-in-a-lifetime hooksian love? The beloved community of human connectedness? All of it.

May we each be so wise as to confront our own mortality not as a cause for despair, but as a reason to live, to try.

I love you (to death),

Edward

Love Note: “Fly” by Sum Bloke

Shameless Plug: If you enjoyed this Love Letter, please share it with someone who you think might enjoy it too. If you read it and thought, “I’d love to hear him in conversation on this topic with my favorite podcast host,” send it to them with a note saying so. If you read this letter and thought that you’d love to hear me speak about this topic or the topic of any other letter on a panel, or as a keynote, at a conference you’re attending or organizing, drop me a line.

To know me is to know that James Baldwin is the ancestor I turn to most often to make sense of the world and my own life, and that is no truer than in the arena of love. This is not because Baldwin had the whole love thing figured out. Quite the contrary. His struggle with love in his personal life opened him to a deeper understanding of its mystery and magic.

My belief that love has become too impotent in our times, converted into some feckless, flimsy, and overly romanticized notion, echoes Baldwin’s sentiments. That conversion frustrates me because love is the single most powerful human possibility: It has started and ended wars, built and destroyed monuments, organized and dispersed peoples, made feeble humans powerful beyond belief and strong ones weaker than imagined. So, for this love holiday, I’d like to invite you to reflect with me on the Baldwinian love ethic as you spend the day hopefully surrounded by all the love you can hold.

1. “Love him,” said Jacques, with vehemence, “love him and let him love you. Do you think anything else under heaven really matters?

When I first read those words in Baldwin’s novel Giovanni’s Room, they knocked the wind out of me. I was a deeply closeted 21-year-old, much like the protagonist in that novel, and the words of the older gay sage indicted me. In no small part, those words are the reason I eventually came out. What really does matter if you’re not willing to give yourself over to love, its many possibilities, and its many defeats?

2. I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.

Love at the national level and patriotism are often confused. It is not only possible, but necessary, to both chant “U-S-A” when we watch our national team play international sports and to chant “Abolish ICE” when a national law enforcement agency becomes the private police of an authoritarian regime. Baldwin understood that loving your country is about loving her into her better angels, not accepting when she lets her demons lead.

3. Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

We’re all hiding. The trouble is that we think we’re hiding from other people when we’re really hiding from ourselves. That is true at the individual, familial, and societal levels. But love forces an unveiling. Love wants to be seen fully as it is, with all of its mess and disarray. That is how one arrives at the love Baldwin describes here. The emphasis on growth as the result of love echoes the definition of love that bell hooks popularized in All About Love: “The will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” She then adds “Love is as love does.” May we dare to love with our masks off so that we might grow and help others to grow.

4. Nobody, no man and no woman, is precisely what they think they are. Love is where you find it. You don’t know where it’ll carry you, and it’s a terrifying thing, love. It’s the only possibility but it’s terrifying.

If love doesn’t scare you, you’re doing it wrong. What makes love “terrifying,” as Baldwin puts it, is that we lose control over the direction. To love another person is to be carried away with them into some unknown and unrequested future. To love your neighbor is to be carried away in their defense when they are under threat. To love your country is to be carried away into the fight, not for her mere existence, but for her future possibilities. That is terrifying, but at its core that is what it means to be human.

5. All I know about human life is that if I love you, I love you. And if I love you and duck it, I die.

Here, Baldwin so eloquently articulates a hard truth: if I love you and hide from it, or am dishonest about it, it is I who suffers, it is I who dies–perhaps not a physical death, but certainly a spiritual one.

I love you (for real),

Edward

The last two quotes are from an interview between James Baldwin and his dear friend Maya Angelou. It is more than worth your time as we reflect on love in the middle of Black History Month.

Love Note: 2 Spirits - I love this song because it so perfectly captures that moment on the dance floor when someone who was once a stranger will be a stranger no more. Wishing you the same universe-aligned collisions.

Shameless Plug: If you enjoyed this Love Letter, please share it with someone who you think might enjoy it too. If you read it and thought, “I’d love to hear him in conversation on this topic with my favorite podcast host,” send it to them with a note saying so. If you read this letter and thought that you’d love to hear me speak about this topic or the topic of any other letter on a panel, or as a keynote, at a conference you’re attending or organizing, drop me a line.

As the story goes, the three little pigs are brothers who set out on their own and build homes to, among other things, protect themselves from the big bad wolf–a known threat to the happiness and livelihood of the little pigs. The version of the story my son recently brought home says that the brothers built their homes of straw, sticks, and brick according to how lazy they were. I don’t recall that moral element to the version I was told as a child, and it makes more sense to me that the brothers built homes according to their know-how or resources. After all, the oldest brother built his house of brick, the middle brother built his house of sticks, and the baby brother built his house of straw. If, as the story goes, the brothers built their homes at the same time, age, finances, or maybe even the number of homes the brothers had seen destroyed over their lifetimes had a lot more to do with the material they used to build their homes than their work ethic. The lesson in morality offered by the version in my son’s book probably needs more interrogation into the systems that led to the brothers’ “choices” or, at the very least, empathy instead of judgment. Whatever the reason for the brothers’ home construction reality, by the time the big bad wolf came along, they were living in homes constructed of variable durability.

When the big bad wolf arrives on the scene, he goes first to the house of the little pig that is made of straw. I used to think that this was merely a fluke of pattern consistency in the storytelling, but now I know more about big bad wolves. The big bad wolf first asks to be let into the house of the littlest little pig, but that little pig, likely having been told the stories of what the big bad wolf had done to previous generations of little pigs, knew better than to let the wolf in. And so he retorts my favorite line: “not by the hair of my chinny chin chin.” The wolf huffs and puffs and easily blows down the frail house of the littlest pig. But the littlest pig is not immediately eaten. Why? Because he runs to his neighbor and brother’s house–the middle brother who made his house of sticks–for safety and protection. We must assume that the middle brother did not chide the baby brother for making his house of straw or ask if there was enough room for him. The middle brother merely acknowledges the crisis, the fear in his littlest brother’s eyes after the close encounter with the big bad wolf, and welcomes him home.

The big bad wolf, undeterred by his failure to capture or kill the littlest pig, runs his same playbook at the house made of sticks. And with a little more effort and similar chiding, the big bad wolf successfully blows down the house of sticks. The two brothers, running for their lives, find themselves at the doorstep of their oldest brother. (Quick shoutout to oldest siblings) Again, the record reflects no moral condemnation, no “I told you so,” nothing other than the open, loving arms and home of the oldest brother pig. Just as the brothers are getting settled in, here came the big bad wolf again. The three brothers told the big bad wolf that there was no way they were letting him into that house and that he should have learned his lesson based on the “chinny chin chins” of the previous two little pig encounters.

Convinced that he would succeed in eating the pigs, the big bad wolf huffed; and he puffed; and he tweeted; and he truth social’d; and he signed unlawful executive orders; and he sent the military into American streets; and Congress stood by and did nothing at best and enabled him at worst; and the Supreme Court justified his behavior; and he defiled historical landmarks; and broke every democracy-saving norm; and ignored every limit in the Constitution; and he tried with all his might to blow the house down. But alas, the brick house of the presumptively well-resourced oldest brother withstood the tactics that destroyed the prior two homes. But did the big bad wolf give up? No. His belief in Christian nationalism or American naziism or some combination of the two led him to merely change tactics and attempt to sneak into the brick house through the chimney.

But the three little pigs were not sitting around doing nothing themselves. Those ingenious little pigs were sitting around with each other, strategizing about not only how to protect themselves but also working together to figure out how to defeat the big bad wolf. One of those little pigs knew the house they were in was vulnerable through the chimney, and must have suggested that when the wolf figured that out and tried to use it to break in, they could use the opportunity to deal with the big bad wolf once and for all. So, when the big bad wolf came down the chimney thinking he had exploited the weakness of the brick house, he quickly discovered a boiling pot ready to make wolf soup. And the big bad wolf and his red hat were never seen or heard from again!

May we have the same sense of community as those three little pigs. May we care for our brothers and sisters without question when they are in need even if we know that the wolf will come for us next. May we not be idle in our places of relative safety, but instead look for ways to make sure it is the wolf who is surprised when he comes down the chimney.

I love you (by the hair of my chinny chin chin),

Edward

Love Note: “Keep Moving”

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The first thread on that entanglement got pulled when I read Pema Chodron’s The Wisdom of No Escape. Chodron is a Buddhist and author who makes Buddhist teachings accessible and able to be integrated into everyday life. I’ve often remarked to friends that if I weren’t born Christian, I’d probably be Buddhist. It never quite occurred to me that one could be both. Nevertheless, in The Wisdom of No Escape, there is a chapter simply titled Joy. In that chapter are two excerpts that had the effect of grabbing me and shaking some of the ropes tying joy and happiness together: a story and a lesson. The story is called “Tigers Above, Tigers Below” and reads simply:

There is a story of a woman running away from tigers. She runs and runs, and the tigers are getting closer and closer. When she comes to the edge of a cliff, she sees some vines there, so she climbs down and holds on to the vines. Looking down, she sees that there are tigers below her as well. She then notices that a mouse is gnawing away at the vine to which she is clinging. She also sees a beautiful little bunch of strawberries close to her, growing out of a clump of grass. She looks up and she looks down. She looks at the mouse. Then she just takes a strawberry, puts it in her mouth, and enjoys it thoroughly.

Joy, the story so beautifully conveys, is a matter of presence with each moment—all of those moments sitting uncomfortably between tigers: some unrequested birth and some unknown death. One must eat the strawberry because it is there and you have the time, this single moment, to enjoy it. Chodron then conveys the teaching of a Buddhist Master, Trungpa Rinpoche, that simply teaches “you can do it.” As Chodron goes on to explain, this lesson essentially boils down to if it can be done grimly, sadly, wearily, it, whatever it is, can be done with joy. For me, it was a direct challenge to the idea that joy could only be experienced during moments of happiness. It is common to experience joy at a wedding, the birth of a child, or a kickback with old friends, where rapturous laughter is the most familiar sound. But joy in the midst of the death of a loved one, joy when you get an unexpected pink slip, joy when the relationship you wished would last ends, joy in the monotony of day-to-day life, joy when the country you call home is falling into a fascist state, really, can that be done with joy? I appreciated the story and accepted the challenge, but it wasn’t quite real for me yet. Intellectually, the possibility of joy in any and every moment made sense, but in practice, I did not know how to get there.

Then, one day a couple of years ago, I was setting up for a backyard dance party with friends while in the midst of a heartbreaking conflict with a romantic partner. I was particularly and distinctly unhappy, as was evidenced by my sour mood. I begrudgingly put up the tent, annoyingly hung the lights and miniature disco ball, and unenthusiastically pushed play on the playlist. And then, of all things, as I’m standing under the tent, it started to rain. With the pelting of raindrops on the top of the tent and everywhere around me, tears began to roll down my face. For some reason, still unknown to me even in this moment, the challenge whispered back to me: “It can be done with joy.” And so, I let the sound of the rain mix with the music blasting through the speaker and started to dance: crying, alone, heartbroken, unhappy, but joyful. Had anyone been watching, they would have had to be forgiven for thinking that I was having a mental breakdown, and perhaps I was in some ways. Something was breaking down for me. Something important had crossed over from theory to practice. The intellectualized was felt, not just understood. It was the day I learned to dance in the rain.

I have returned to that lesson often over the last few years during challenging moments. No more than recently as we have begun the faster-than-expected decline into some form of authoritarian state. With every major breaking news alert, happiness eludes me. Every video of the military on our streets, immigrants being inhumanely ripped from their families, long-accepted Constitutional principles tossed aside, less and less happy. Something about dancing alone in the rain wasn’t quite reaching the depths of my despair. But now I believed “it could be done with joy,” I just didn’t quite know how to reach it. That forced me into reflection. We may be the first generation of Americans to watch our democracy fall into authoritarianism, but we’re not the first generation to need to survive challenging times. In fact, as a Black gay man, I exist because my ancestors survived state oppression.

My Black ancestors survived being enslaved not only by their sheer grit but because that grit was mixed with joy. We know this because of the traditions that have been handed down to us. We jump the broom at weddings as they did because moments of union are to be celebrated, even if we must return to the fields to labor immediately thereafter. My body still moves seemingly on its own when rhythmic drums beat nearby–ancestral joy on a cellular level. And singing together while toiling, singing together while sad, singing together while hurt, singing together while oppressed, came over on the ships that dropped my ancestors at the base of the Savannah River.

The same is true of my queer ancestors. As Quinta Brunson once quipped: “people be gay.” And I would add, “people been gay.” There is no time in history when queer people are absent; hidden often, but never absent. And when queer people gathered in the same place, we danced, we laughed, we built places of respite–places we could be free. It is no accident that when the NYPD raided the Stonewall Inn, we were dancing. Our existence was unlawful, but we danced anyway.

My Black and queer ancestors answered for me the question of why dancing in the rain alone is insufficient to conjure joy in this present moment. It is because joy, deep, survival-oriented joy must be created by community. Joy built by, and experienced in, community is more durable than individual joy.

When the echoes of “wade in the water” permeated the air over the cotton fields, it was the joining of voices and hearts while struggling together that generated the joy that gave my ancestors the ability to survive. When the civil rights leaders of yore retired from a long day of resisting state oppression, someone turned on a jazz record as the living room filled with swaying bodies, tired but joyful. When AIDS rampaged the queer community, we buried our brothers at memorial services by day and then danced to Donna Summer under the nearest disco ball together at night, sad but joyous.

So too for us now. This moment, this time, can also be done with joy. We can create sustainable, durable, survival-based joy together. That is our challenge. And we must answer it by taking every opportunity to be joyous with one another.

It turns out those folks singing and shouting together in the church pews of my youth understood something that I have only recently come to truly understand: joy is how we survive.

I love you (joyfully),

Edward

One of the ways I say I love you is

by sharing music that moves me, so you’ll often find at the bottom of each Love Letter a “Love Note” (as in musical note) that I hope you’ll enjoy.

Love Note: “dancing in the rain”

Shameless Plug: If you enjoyed this Love Letter, please share it with someone who you think might enjoy it too. If you read it and thought, “I’d love to hear him in conversation on this topic with my favorite podcast host,” send it to them with a note saying so. If you read this letter and thought that you’d love to hear me speak about this topic or the topic of any other letter on a panel, or as a keynote, at a conference you’re attending or organizing, drop me a line.

You can expect mostly short-form essays, but occasionally I’ll publish some longer-form work that I’ve developed over time. The topics will run the gamut, but will be the kinds of topics we would discuss if we sat down for a long dinner. That means that sometimes the essay will be a commentary on a recent newsworthy event, or something that finally made sense to me after making no sense at all for a long time, or a reflection on how something ostensibly from the past feels deeply of the current moment, or even futuristic. And sometimes it might just be a review of some other writer’s work about which I have something to say, and that I hope you won’t mind hearing about.

For example, the first Love Letter to hit your inbox will be an essay on the concept of joy and its distinctness from happiness. It is an idea that has been rolling around in my head for months and that I’ve shared with nearly every friend at a long dinner in that time. That essay will be a good preview of what I hope you will come to expect: a piece of writing that makes you go, “hmm..that’s an interesting idea,” or “hmm…I’ve never quite thought about it like that,” or “hmm…that makes absolutely no sense to me and I’m going to tell him why he’s wrong.” Hopefully, there will be less of the latter. But, I started publishing as the political columnist for The Hilltop, the then-daily student newspaper at Howard University, during the Obama-McCain 2008 election, and there were plenty of days when both the College Democrats and the College Republicans were upset with my column. Since then, I’ve published for Mic.com (then PolicyMic) on a host of political and non-political issues. And, I’m a practicing lawyer, where the job of the lawyer on the other side is to find as many ways as possible to tell a court that I’m wrong. So, needless to say, I’m used to healthy disagreement with my views, and I will welcome it.

As a final note, I’d like to share why I’m calling this series “The Love Letter.” Unlike your AP literature class in high school, I am not hiding the ball on my central thesis. It is this: Love, in whatever form it takes, is the only thing that truly matters. I don’t mean the flimsy romanticized love of the post-Enlightenment era. I mean a community-based love ethic like that of Dr. King, which upset American apartheid. I mean bell hooks’s exultation that love is “what we do not just what we feel.” I mean a James Baldwin-inspired love that says that it is precisely because I love this country that “I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” It is this critical, action-oriented, mountain-moving, community-based, society-shifting kind of love that will rest sometimes loudly but often whispering at the bottom of every letter I plan to send. I believe that that’s the love that will save us, whether it is from a parent to a child, friend to a friend, brother to a sister, neighbor to a community, citizen to her country, a lover to a lover, or for as long as you’ll have me: from me to you.

So, welcome. I hope you’ll stay and invite a few others along the way.

I love you,

Edward