I don’t know about you, but I love reading the quotes at the start of a book because they give me the feel of what I’m about to dive into.
As a writer, finding the right quote is always super important to me.
In this book, I nailed it. . .if I do say so myself. LOL
Here it is:
“I think when we wake up in the morning, we can choose between fear and love. Every morning. And every morning, if you choose one, that doesn’t define you in the end. . .The way you end your story is important. It’s important that we choose love over fear, because love is the answer.”
Guillermo del Toro, Oscar-winning director of The Shape of Water.
For those of you who might not know, Guillermo del Toro is a Mexican director, screenwriter, and producer known for, and I quote from the Internets, “imbuing horror and fantasy films with emotional and thematic complexity.”
I love del Toro’s movies, which is saying a lot, because mostly I don’t like scary movies.
And I love this quote for so many reasons.
First, it was said by a director of scary movies who got—just as my dad did —that the whole reason we have to face our fears in movies is to help us remember that life is always and only about love.
(FYI, for those of you who don’t know, my dad was an actor named Vincent Price, the King of Horror — and del Toro grew up loving his films.)
Second, del Toro reminds us that we not only can but have to choose between fear and love every day. But let’s face it: all too often, we choose fear. Despite that — and this is my favorite part about what del Toro says — choosing fear one day or three days or even for years doesn’t have to define us, as long as we wake up every morning and keep trying to choose love. Every single morning, we have to keep trying to choose love.
And the third reason I love this quote is because I love it when people get it and aren’t afraid to say it. All we hear in the news are so many reasons to hate, judge, and be afraid. But del Toro says it with such clarity — Love is the ONLY answer.
That’s what my whole book is about. Now, I hope this podcast will add to the book what I didn’t have the courage to say with the kind of clarity del Toro did in this quote when the book came out back in April of 2020: Love IS the Answer.
Which is why we all have to wake up every morning and keep choosing Love not fear.
Yet all too many mornings, I have not. We all have not.
That’s why choosing love is THE most important heart-centered practice of all.
This podcast is my way of holding myself accountable to this ongoing practice.
Not just because it takes commitment, but because sometimes we have to do something hard to keep that commitment.
For me, that’s this podcast.
I am NOT a podcast person. Don’t listen to them. I prefer audiobooks.
So, recording a podcast about this book forces me to take inventory of my commitment in every single episode.
Which brings me to something that happened a few weeks ago. It was the huge a-ha moment that led me doing the podcast at all.
I was collaborating on a home rebuild after Hurricane Helene here in Western North Carolina. I was thrilled to have found a contractor whose creativity I really enjoyed. However, as time went on, it became clear that our organizational styles differed.
Because of all the rebuilding after the hurricane, he was way too overcommitted. He didn’t show up to work when I thought he would and then did show up when I didn’t expect him to be there. As a result, I wasn’t always around, and design choices were made without my approval.
This obviously wasn’t good. But because the job kept falling further and further behind, and I wanted to keep my client happy, I focused on trying to keep things moving forward instead of paying attention to the quality control issues. I didn’t stand up to what wasn’t working in terms of scheduling, job flow, and outcome — so of course, eventually, everything came to a head. Everyone was unhappy. Eventually, a decision was made to go a different route.
I had been so excited about this project — seeing it as an opportunity to build back better. But heart-centered practice is only as strong as your core beliefs. And I had not been choosing love in the morning, let alone living it on this project.
I once had a spiritual director who put it this way: When you design, say, a kitchen, what people eventually ooh and ah over is the pretty tile, the lovely cabinets, the nice light fixtures. But you can’t put those in until you’re sure the house has a firm foundation, a solid floor, insulated and level walls, electrical wiring. . .You get the idea. You can’t even begin to think about the fun and pretty stuff if you don’t build the foundation first.
When the whole job blew up in my face, I had no one to blame but myself.
Why? Because I was too scared to speak the truth. I kept trying so hard to manage the situation for everyone else that I never articulated what wasn’t working for me. I had been unhappy for months. And since I was the lynchpin of the whole thing, it all came tumbling down.
I thought by managing the contractor and trying to make the client happy, I was choosing love.
It took me a while to realize that being too afraid of conflict to right the ship is not love.
Eventually, of course, the ship sank.
That helped me see just how often fear-based people-pleasing and terror of the judgment of others has been the story of my life.
And I know why.
A few years ago, my cousin Lynn shared a story with me. The youngest child of my maternal aunt, Lynn was raised in Victoria, British Columbia. Growing up, she was fascinated by stories of my successful costume designer mother, who had escaped the island and eventually married a movie star. When Lynn was a teenager, my parents invited her to Los Angeles for a week. One of the highlights of the trip was dinner at the fancy restaurant on the Queen Mary.
Their meal had just been served when a fan came over to greet my father. In his enthusiasm, the man knocked over a glass of ice water, which spilled all over everyone’s food. Lynn was just about to tuck into her fried shrimp dinner. Now, she watched the breading go cold and soggy as my father chatted with the man and signed an autograph.
As soon as the fan left, the waiter came over to apologize and ask whether he could replace the food. Lynn eagerly nodded, only to hear my parents say in unison, “Oh no, this is just fine."
Fine, Lynn thought. This is anything but fine. I don’t want to eat soggy, ice-cold breaded shrimp.
After the waiter left, my mother turned to Lynn and said, “You’re probably wondering why we refused him. It’s because we have to. . If we don’t, the tabloids will say that Vincent was a rude, inconsiderate person. So, you’ll just have to eat your shrimp as it is."
That was the moment Lynn decided that if this was what fame felt like, it wasn’t worth it.
The thing is, my parents were so wrong. There is no way the waiter or the chef or the maitre-d’ would have thought they were rude or inconsiderate for accepting the offer of a fresh plate of food. I’m sure the restaurant was horrified to watch my family eat ruined food.
Or my parents could have said, “We’re so sorry to waste this food. We would love to have our meals remade — but only if we can pay for it.”
That didn’t happen.
Hearing Lynn's story became a huge a-ha moment for me. It made me realize how I had become a past master at clamming up, at hiding, and not telling the truth about who I was or how I felt. Clamming up was expected in my family.
But here’s the problem with clamming up: Even if you stop speaking your truth, the truth never stops speaking to you. So, you have to figure out ways to drown it out — and those ways usually aren’t super healthy. Bingeing on food, shopping, travel, drinking, television. Judging others, fearing others, hating others. These are all ways we learn to deafen ourselves.
But the worst problem is that the more you stop listening to the truth, the more you block Love. Until one day the person who looks back at you from the mirror is someone you cannot stand.
Brene Brown writes "The most dangerous stories we make up are the narratives that diminish our inherent worthiness. We must reclaim the truth about our lovability, divinity, and creativity."
A few years ago, when I heard her speak in Austin, she said that as we begin to find the courage to listen to the truth and then speak it, we can absolutely expect our courage will be dissed, doubted, diminished, deprecated. People in our lives will fall by the wayside. Everything will change — and that change will not always be comfortable or easy. The question is — are we willing to trade in our old stories, our false safeties, for a new narrative, for true safety — which is safety in truth? Or will we keep choosing fear instead of love — and then justifying it?
That’s often what I’ve done.
That’s why this podcast is such a huge step for me. No wonder I didn’t fight for this book when it came out. I was too scared.
So why change now?
Because in today’s world most everybody is flat-out terrified about something. The idea that Love is the answer probably seems pretty ridiculous if your country is being bombed or invaded, if you’ve lost everything in a natural disaster, if you just got fired, if your financial lifeline may be taken away, if you or someone you love could be or has been deported if you’re afraid that the world is going to hell in a handbasket with no brakes.
We all try to assuage our fears with coping techniques—figuring out how to fix the most immediate problem and ignoring the problems that seem too big, binge-watching, binge eating, binge drinking, binge scrolling, or refusing to talk about whatever seems too hard.
Never realizing that by doing that, we’ve chosen fear.
Fear is a shapeshifter and all too often it resembles love in the form of a chocolate chip cookie or your favorite TV show or puppy videos on social media.
But none of that is love. It’s all fear in disguise.
Back in the spring of 2020, when people told me that living Love felt impossible in the face of so much hate and fear, I knew they didn’t get what living Love means.
Living love is not some Hallmark movie. This is Love with the Big L. Love that is fierce. A warrior. A battleground. A superpower. Radical. Indestructible. Invincible.
Living Love with the Big L is quite literally the ONLY ANSWER to this fear-created mess in which we’ve all found ourselves.
Love is there, waiting for us to live it.
I called the book LIVING Love for a reason and I chose Guillermo del Toro’s quote as my invocation for the same reason.
We have to live Love, choose Love, open our hearts to Love, practice Love, or nothing will change.
So, what is this Love with the Big L — and how do we do that?
That’s what this podcast is about.
It’s also about me, finding the courage to be radically honest even if — as Brene Brown says — I am dissed, doubted, dishonored, and diminished for my beliefs.
I KNOW living Love is a game changer. It’s the game changer we all need right now, just as it was five years ago when the book came out and we were in a bitter election year locked down in pandemic.
Time for me to pull on my big-girl pants and stop being scared, and live Love enough to speak the truth.
Time for us all to have this conversation, to live Love together.
I hope you’ll keep joining me.