Live Love Leave didn’t exist
in early August of 2011. I was living my life as I had been for years: I was teaching high school students in a small independent school, wishing I were writing more, and drifting pleasantly along.
When one of my students, a young man I had loved and mentored for three years, took his own life, everything changed. I couldn’t find firm ground.
When even your priest tells you to see a therapist, you finally go. I got lucky; I found a wise woman who asked me the questions I needed at exactly the right moments. She helped me remember how to trust the ground beneath my feet.
Looking back, I think I was trying to figure out if the world was worthy of my love. Did we live in a world where love destroys you, or the world I had thought I lived in, where love makes everything matter?
The answer, I learned, is all of the above. (Or, as Sr. Therapist would say, it’s “both/and.”) I had to learn to love and trust this precarious world that wrecks us with pain and heals us with glory.
Live Love Leave Sprang to Life
as an imperative on that journey. One morning I woke up knowing that I needed to start a blog. I think I felt that if I could just say the right words, we could all step back from the brink.
We live, we love, and we leave. I’m here to tell as much truth as I can stumble on about each of those things.
I hope you’ll join me.