Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Love and Making a Life

I want mothering to be part of my life. To offer and receive loving care and support with friends, family members and my cats. I stretch mothering to hold those things. When I grieve not having a child, I want to remind myself those feelings pass; I want to let myself feel what I feel without attempting to tidy those emotions up into neat resolutio

My ‘you’ could be liquid, flowing from one thing to another. It could contain many people and things, be so vast as to be God-sized, an oceanic you. Or it could be small and exact like a square of pure pigment, with a startling itselfness, which once it goes beyond me can transform all it touches.

The art of Roddy’s poems is a trail of breadcrumbs I can follow to be close to his soul and all its raucous contradictions. All the poems, all the songs, all the artworks that I’ve felt adhere to my own soul, perhaps they are the ‘you’ object I have in mind when I sing ‘A Case of You’. The way in which my own soul reaches a fluency. It’s a love son

Even though I don’t believe in a god, I still feel I am in touch with something beyond myself. Sometimes it’s an occurrence timed with such ingenuity it feels cosmic. Like the gift of the piano. Other times, it’s a sense of profound connection. One morning my cat settled on the pillow just above my head. It’s always my desire for her to do this, bu

When I called Katia to say thank you, she told me she’d been thinking about how when you’re single you don’t usually get the huge, special presents that people in relationships sometimes give each other, that they labour over and save up for. She wanted me to have that experience and grant herself the pleasure of giving. A grand, loving gesture was

But when that anxiety falls away, when hurt retreats, it becomes clear to me how often my soul meets another’s. I’ve felt it rise to the surface of my body, so that my body has been aglow with it. The occasions that have created that response have been so various – vulnerability, illness, shame, pleasure, community, art. In these states of soulful

long poem I love by the Canadian writer Anne Carson, called ‘The Glass Essay’.

When I first read it, I thought only a lover could use the word ‘soul’ and get away with it. But it can’t be right that I need a lover so that I can speak of having a soul. That doesn’t do justice to the role platonic love plays in my life, its endless occasions for consideration of the soul. And it does not recognise the way art enables deep conne

Plenitude of one love doesn’t reduce the pain or longing for a type of love you want but don’t have. Though I sometimes try to sell myself the idea that it does.