Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.
— Matt Groening
No, no, Nicola and I aren’t grumpy at each other, and this isn’t me being bitter and twisted. This quote is just the laugh-out-loud truth about love that no one ever tells us when they’re giving us the Barbie and Ken Dream Wedding Set (and if you’re a guy, trust me, the world gives you the Dream Set too, just in different ways).
There are so many ways that love tests us — all love, from friendship to parenthood to marriage to… whatever. At some point in all these relationships, the ice weasels come and we have to decide if we will lie there while they chew. We have to decide whether the love is worth it.
Why am I thinking Deep Ice Weasel Thoughts on a slow Sunday morning? I have no idea, although perhaps it’s because I am also seeing in the world the kind of love that doesn’t always get much airtime: the love of human beings for the humanity of others. I see it in JobAngels, where people are helping strangers find jobs. I see it in the woman who barters handywork for office tasks that she could easily afford to pay for — she has the money, but she knows things are tight for others and she wants to help. I see it in the people who every day give strangers, including me, a kind word or a reassuring comment on a blog post.
The ice weasels are certainly with us right now. But the angels are too. I’m not religious, so I don’t mean stern beings with wings and white robes. I mean people who commit acts of human love in spite of their own fear and their own struggle, whether it’s a small kindness to a stranger or the sometimes-wrenching choices we make for those we love most closely. All those things we do for love. If we let it, love makes angels of us all.
What a wonderful metaphor. Our snowmobile turned over quite a while ago and we do not seem to be able to get upright. I know that love is worth it, I have seen it in so many ways. We just have to work harder to keep the ice weasels at bay.
I always find it difficult to talk about love. It’s much easier to recognize kindness, because we do acts of kindness for people we love and people we don’t even know. Love is a very complex experience. Kindness, once we feel the impulse, is simple and direct. Hell, I don’t know. They’re related. Thanks, as usual, for writing about it.
Kelley,
You wrote:
“But the angels are too. Iâm not religious, so I donât mean stern beings with wings and white robes. I mean people who commit acts of human love in spite of their own fear and their own struggle, whether itâs a small kindness to a stranger or the sometimes-wrenching choices we make for those we love most closely. All those things we do for love. If we let it, love makes angels of us all.”
Beautiful.
Terry
“If we let it, love makes angels of us all”
Odd that we who love/want/need love so much can also oftentimes be so afraid of it – of what it takes to share it/to show it. Because despite the ice weasels — for me at least — it is what makes the really, truly hard stuff in life worth doing. And also makes the easy stuff so much more joyful.
Rory, hang in there. There have been times when I’ve been upside down under the snowmobile so long that I thought I wouldn’t make it. But love gives us the will to do more, for longer, than we think we can. It’s ironic that sometimes love depends more on sheer bloody-mindedness than anything else.
I am thinking of you.
Barbara, I really do think at base that it’s all “love” of some kind, although English is so biased towards a limited interpretation of the word. We have more words for kinds of coffee than kinds of love, what’s that about?
Terry, thank you. Glad you liked it.
Jennifer, I believe that love and fear are the two most powerful forces in the universe. They are the dichotomy for me — not god and satan, or good and evil, but love and fear. One of the great lessons for me is that fear makes me think I’m protecting myself by making fearful choices. Love makes me feel so vulnerable, but at the same time it makes me feel… I don’t know, safe isn’t really the right word, but it’s something like that. Something much more truly safe than the self-protection of fear.
Kelley,
I think the moment the snowmobile flips is when the love affair really begins. And when we are pinned, the trick is not to keep the ice weasels at bay — it is to feed them with our flesh until they are sleek and strong, until they become our wild friends willing to let us harness them in a sled team that is faster than the old snowmobile ever was. Then we sail off, wearing our scars as the tatoos of love — trying not to flip over again too soon!
John and Kelley
Speaking of angels, isn’t it interesting that I came across this today. The snowmobile flipped on Friday. I needed the reminder to let the ice weasels come nibble on me.
Kelley, it isn’t only English that is “so biased towards a limited interpretation of the word” love. In ancient Greek eros gradually came to mean simply lust, and by the time the New Testament was written agape had taken on connotations of what we’d now call erotic love, including the marital. (The great scholar James Barr traced this drift about 20 years ago, in a paper whose source I don’t have handy at the moment.) So the tendency to sexualize “love” is not limited to English.
I think it’s fine that English has just one word for “love,” since that’s a reminder that love is not a simple thing and covers a wide range of emotions and behavior.
This is a matter of taste — my humanism showing through — but I think I’d rather call “people who commit acts of human love in spite of their own fear and their own struggle” human beings, rather than angels. Human beings are complex too, and rather than supernaturalize us when we do good things (which I think is a very fundamentalist-Christian kind of attitude), I’d rather give us credit for using our capacity for good. We even have a good word for it in English: humane.
Duncan, no comment. Just Towanda. 🙂