I was frustrated and depressed about my continuing inability to write about love, afraid of crying at the pool, hiding behind my mask and sunglasses.

This mid-October, I was sitting at the one of the pools at a hotel in Las Vegas.

I was looking around, people-watching from a distance, staring at the blank sheet of paper in my spiral notebook, struggling to write something about love.

I put my earbuds in, unable to witness any more security and life guards attempting to get people to comply to the mask mandate and the arguments that followed. I listened to music then switched to watch, as I had done too many times, news videos on YouTube, seeking answers that don’t come of the coveted hope and change I felt over 4 years ago. This choice furthered my angst in the political climate and my will so weak, to write about love right now. Just over a month ago, I had lost a long-time nonromantic love, my most influential, who had passed away, also the recent end of two other romantic relationships that were back to back breakups; one being my very long marriage. Feeling diminished, I eventually folded the notebook over and placed it back into my small blue backpack and left the pool to my hotel room.

I turned on the news in my room, took a shower and thankfully, after my shower, a rerun of The Way I See It, by Chief Whitehouse Photographer, Pete Souza, was beginning. The experience I felt watching it again, as during the first time, triggered everything about love within me. Especially after a year with so much trauma. For an hour or so of allowing myself to watch the documentary again, I began to feel the effects of the purity of love, its tragedy, drama, loss, sadness, exasperation, beauty and courage.
So much emotion in the raw came up in me. I was back in the US after a month in Tulum, Mexico to vote, waiting every day for my ballot, for over 3 weeks, and not receiving it because the USPS had been compromised. The rage over that situation flooding my body, my heart pounding, especially after witnessing people fighting over masks, throwing drinks in waitresses faces and other abhorrent behaviors during this pandemic. Not ideal circumstances to write about love.
I sat on my bed, numb, in my glam room with a view of the beautiful Bellagio Fountains, but I was feeling everything and nothing. I watched the images during the Obama presidencies on the large tv screen with Pete Souza’s soft, earthy voice narrating his experience. He explained the emotions he felt during his 8 years with the Obama Administration and also for the Reagan Administration. I felt it was all about love and how much I missed decency and respect for each other. The same feelings I have felt in healthy relationships, I recognized, are the same as I felt while watching the documentary. In those authentically beautiful moments in the photos between Ronald and Nancy Reagan, a romantic love, and the same between Barack and Michelle Obama, I had the heaviness in my heart, the heat in my face and eyes, seeing those very human photographs of real connection. Frozen moments in their lives that flow a vibration to the person seeing them of love in all of its forms. Their pain in loss, their display of agony with tough decisions, their joys with each other and their families, resonating with my own losses and disappointments.
I’ll never forget the impact from the 2004 Democratic Convention Speech by then Senator Barack Obama as the keynote speaker, clips that were replayed in the documentary that offered me the remembrance of hope, excitement, something new and promising, just as I would feel for my first love that shaped my life, and two of my other important relationships later on.
I watched President Obama in those photos on the screen, agonizing, in deep pain, over the shootings in Sandy Hook Elementary School before addressing the citizens of Newtown, Connecticut. That love took on a form of compassion and empathy for the suffering community. The kind of love that took so much courage to give in such a devastating circumstance, showing up and offering that to strangers, to comfort them in a grief I can’t wrap my mind around. A terrifying feeling. The compassion I saw in those photographs of the caring, the remorse, the hope, the looking for answers, the support of a hug or just listening and being heard. The grief that can well up in your chest, the heaviness of the tears in your eyes, the anxiety of so much emotion running through you, that you can’t breathe when your body is begging for you to. All from love.
In the photographs and videos of the eulogy for former Senator and Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in a church in Charleston, SC; President Obama took the chance, with much hesitation, to sing Amazing Grace. He stepped out of his comfort zone in hoping the people in the church would sing with him. To lift them up was love, I noticed the slow, surprised reactions on their faces as they began to sing. They appeared to be feeling another chance, that perhaps things were going to be ok and Obama was helping them to feel that. What love could be stronger? It was a powerful moment of inclusion and support while people were in deep shock and sorrow.
I slowly began to connect my own experiences in this documentary, watching the beauty from the photographs of Barack and Michelle with their daughters. Love flowing from those photographs of them as children, and as they grew up. It made me think of the love of a parent when their children leave home. Of how I felt when my son grew up and left for college and later to live in another state. The potential of doubt if they will still love us back, if they will stay in contact, even though they say they will. They have new lives now and we’re forced to see our own. How much of our self-worth and self-love was dependent on our role and pride as their parent? Or where, if we’re married or in another type of partnership, do we stand in that bond that has been existing with the inclusion of children who are now gone?
I have learned, on the other side of these experiences, that love is something I must pay attention to as life plays out. What am I choosing in the present moment? Is it love? Is there compassion and empathy within me? Am I being true to myself with this person? Are expectations getting in the way? I realized in my anger and rage, as I returned the US, and before that, that I have more work to do with unhealed wounds so triggered during this difficult year.
I know that love is a practice, that I can choose to be it. Even though I can write very little right now about love in my personal experiences, a door opened about the expression of love, for a short time, through the photographs and narration in The Way I See It. I am inspired by Pete Souza finding his truth through his work with President Obama and the very contrasting election of President Trump. He found an unexpected other purpose, as an activist against what he sees is hurting our country. I also see that I had to look outside of myself, even for just a while, to be able to begin again, to gather myself and understand what is going on within me concerning the confusing, complex beauty of love.