Gratitude And Unceasing Embrace

Notes on reciprocity and the practice of being held.

Aug 08, 2025

“To be washed with love, we must learn to receive it.”

If you wish to listen to the audio version, go here: podcast. The interludes are my clumsy kalimba playing, accompanied by the crane's delightful calls at dusk, recorded one night by the river :)

Hello dear reader,

How are you this week? What are you grateful for?

The Dollar or Butter Fish, Rhombus triacanthus. (1898) by John L. Petrie (American, 19th Century)

Love tears us apart from the inside out, enabling us to see ourselves from the inside. It calls us home, and if we let it, it will undo us to the bare bones so that in them we may know only truth remains. It might be causing deep pain, but invariably, it reminds us: This is all you asked for.*

In the search for love, we often omit ourselves and the love that is given to us freely with every step, with every breath. The love of the Greatest of Mothers. Mother Earth.

It permeates all, animates all, infusing us with unencumbered sweetness. In her unceasing embrace, we get to bloom and wither and bloom and wither once more—and over again. She is the tenderest nurturer and the most demanding teacher. Perhaps it is because we fear her lessons that we restrain ourselves from truly receiving her care. After all, she obeys the ways of life without fail. And that is what often frightens us.

When the tempest of life’s teachings rolls in upon my shores, sharpening the edges, and I find myself feeling emptied and sorrowful and lonely, longing for physical touch—an embrace in which to hide from the fierce unmasking—I have learnt my way that never leaves me stranded.

I go and place my bare hands on the Earth’s bare skin—the soil, a tree, the surface of her waters. Hold me a little closer when I am falling, I plead with her. Disarmed, I give myself to the ultimate embrace.

We are wired for connection and, from our very first day here, we learned that being in another’s loving arms meant undeniable safety. Yet the well of affection resides in us as much as it does in others. And so it resides in the Earth and in all her expressions: the trees and the flowers and grass and the birds and squirrels and ants and fish and beavers and goats and cows and moose.

If we think about it, we are never not in such embrace. We are never unsafe. All this to say, there is never a moment in our lives when we are not loved.

My dear mentor and friend tells me time and again: do not be afraid to ask like a child. Do not be afraid to reach your hands forward and say, I need help, I need to feel loved, please show me what it means to be loved.

At first I did not know how to do it. I had forgotten what it meant to receive just because I asked, without having earned it by compliance, self-sacrifice, or labour. But I wanted to feel it, so I kept trying. Repeatedly, I stretched my hands out in front of me and moved my fingers childlike in a grasping gesture. I need to feel loved, please show me I am loved.

And my plea was heard. In response, I became undone. Shaken up from the ground up. All the elements of my life that I thought were the utmost sources of love and safety revealed their true nature. Family, friends, relationships, job, money, health, roof over my head, identities. All conditional, all only offering love and safety if it was earned.

Do not get me wrong—this is their true nature, not a failing on anyone’s part; it is neither good nor bad. However, it is inherently limited, and there comes a time when to keep living means to reunite more closely with the unbound. And even if I still tried to cling to them, they were removed one by one, until I had nothing to hold on to but my own shaky hands, and the Earth.

I remember when, about two months ago, I walked into a lake and washed my forehead and the crown of my head with its waters, and said, I surrender. I do not know the ways that lead me to where I must go. Please, let me be like water. Please, show me how to circulate, shape-shift without hesitation, and flow. And I knew the responsibility of such a request. I knew I would get what I was asking for, and I hoped for it as much as I feared it.

I knew it would mean embracing life’s ways as the Earth does—opening myself to unbounded flourishing and the lushness of life as much as to inevitable death. But it was already when living felt like trying to survive at the mouth of the abyss, and my grip had begun to loosen. Following the water’s currents, I learned to dissolve some more. To be purified and fluid, while keeping my roots intact. This is the teaching of the Earth. As Virginia Woolf once wrote, “I am rooted, but I flow.”

Before I knew it, be like water became my mantra, prayer, and guidance. The resistance to be submerged in life’s depths began yielding ever more. I found that what I thought to be a murky bottom was, in fact, an opening. A fertile soil in which to replant my life’s expressions. “…the idea of being like water is to attempt to embody the qualities of fluidity and naturalness in one’s life,” wrote Shannon Lee in Be Water, My Friend.

At first, I felt sad hugging a tree, instead of another’s body. As if I was just miserably trying to replace what I actually longed for. But still, I kept venturing into the forest and wrapping my arms around the trees and asking them, like water, to teach me their ways—and to love me back. Until eventually, it felt like a replacement no more. It became the embrace.

I observed my innate receptivity attuning more deeply to the sweetest love enfolding me on all sides, emanating from plant, animal, and other relatives—soil, sun, rain, clouds, oceans and rivers. I approach them with reverence and thank them for their wisdom and unceasing embrace.

I became like a child again, stretching my arms forward without shame and asking to be shown how much I am loved. It required overcoming the conviction that I am only worthy if I carry more than I can, that being a woman meant being either modest and unassuming, accepting everyone’s load without complaint—or bold and provocative, refusing to be the caretaker.

Instead, following the Earth’s sermon, I learned that there is an untamed, breathtaking wildness to it that holds it all. The readiness and longing to offer care blend seamlessly with boundless passion, devotional love, and the deepest, darkest, rawest sorrow—all of it, the ongoing labour that brings creation forth.

It is an untamed force indeed to follow one’s nature without fail, as Mother teaches us. The masculine arises as a container, a living riverbed that carries the waters far and surely, preventing them from spilling all over without direction.

“Water is present to its circumstances and surroundings and therefore ready to move in any direction that allows it passage. That openness and pliability means it is in a constant state of readiness, but a natural readiness because it is simply being wholly itself. To be like water, then, is to realize your most whole, natural, and actualized self where you are living as much as possible in the slipstream of life as you forge your own path forward,”

concludes Shannon Lee.

To be washed with love, we must learn to receive it. This is the most whole, natural way. And that oftentimes means being emptied out and forged, like molten iron, until we crack open and melt all over, and over again. So that we can welcome this love, with all its magnitude—as fully as it comes upon us.

When we are porous enough, when we breathe knowing that the oxygen offered by the plant friends is the purest offering of love, we not only know, but also feel with our entire being, that “The land loves us back,” as Robin Wall Kimmerer reminds us in her luminous book Braiding Sweetgrass, which I am only halfway through, and already know I want to re-read.

“She loves us with beans and tomatoes, with roasting ears and blackberries and birdsongs. By a shower of gifts and a heavy rain of lessons. She provides for us and teaches us to provide for ourselves. That is what good mothers do.”

If you had breakfast today, you are loved. If you showered or took a sip of water, you are loved. If you saw a glimpse of green or perhaps swathes of it, even if just for a moment, you are loved. If the birdsong delighted your ears, you are loved. If you are breathing, then yes, with each breath, you are bathed in this kind of thickest, yet most spacious love, that enfolds and empowers every-thing.

Let us return to Kimmerer for a moment still. She continues: “Knowing that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling transforms the relationship from a one-way street into a sacred bond.”

Love evokes responsibility. It asks of us that we not only receive it, but, most importantly, reciprocate it—so that it can continue circling freely through all creation. And what better way to honour it than through heartfelt, earnest gratitude? “(…) while expressing gratitude seems innocent enough, it is a revolutionary idea,” writes Kimmerer.

“In a consumer society, contentment is a radical proposition. Recognizing abundance rather than scarcity undermines an economy that thrives by creating unmet desires. Gratitude cultivates an ethic of fullness, but the economy needs emptiness. (…) Gratitude does not send you out shopping to find satisfaction; it comes as a gift rather than a commodity, subverting the foundation of the whole economy. That is good medicine for land and people alike.”

I have tasted this medicine now, having found emergency shelter in the dreamiest riverside house, which nurtured and consoled me in ways I did not expect I could still receive. Time and again I felt as if I could melt when gratitude swelled up in me, rounding the sharp rim of my shore.

I was fed full by the land with its raspberries, by the birdsong at dawn, by the orange sunsets, the hum of the trees above my head, the colourful explosion of the wildflowers, and, most of all—the wisdom and grace of the river as it welcomed me day by day, washing me of all that no longer belonged, watering me into new bloom.

It is the kind of abundance that defies language and convention. It demands that we give it undivided presence and devotion so that it can fill us up lovingly, like honeyed milk fills an empty vessel. It escapes the life-narrowing ways of the modern world and restores us to the simplest, borderless state of being: just as we are. Just as life is.

We have been led away from the land and its embrace, and made to believe that we cannot be held just because we exist. To open ourselves to undoing, to feel gratitude for the gifts we are offered freely in every second, and to reciprocate them just as openly, is to stand in our sovereignty. It means to pledge interdependence.

This, right here, is the unceasing embrace. Both a blessing and a duty.

*the opening lines are inspired by the song by Ayla Nereo titled Oh Love and Olivia Fern’s In Your Bones.

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