Love Letter to Andrea Gibson

“…because where I come from, beauty is in the eye of anyone who sees what’s missing, but can’t stop pointing to what’s still there. If there is no definition for love yet, I think that’s a good one.” 
 – “The Year of No Grudges” by Andrea Gibson

Dear Andrea,
I was looking for Colorado writers when I found you, and it was love at first listen. “The Year Of No Grudges,” is a poem that is everything I am trying to write, to be,  snuggled up together like a litter of kittens. I fell for you hard and fast, and that’s how I came to write this letter. 

I am a disciple of pointing to what is still there, but your poems gave my passion a voice. I fall easily in love with the world, but my teenage daughter does not. When I point to glistening, snow-frosted trees, she sees only that someday it won’t snow or there won’t be trees. When I show her the bottomless well of wonder that sustains me, she is reluctant to drink, and says, “Sure, it’s good at first, but it has the aftertaste of wasteland, of burden, of being the clean up crew after everyone else’s party.”

She is not wrong, Andrea. Everywhere she turns, she is served super-sized, doomsday facts about her future: species extinction, melting ice caps, oceans of plastic. She looks at her long road on a dying earth and thinks, “Why bother?”

I have ten thousand reasons, but it turns out you can’t give someone a “why.” No matter how often I try to bake meaning into her morning scone she spits it out like a seed and points to the vacant mansions littering our ski town home and tells me two of her coworkers live out of their cars. All around us are big boy mountains, thick forests and so much of what is still there, but she says every year more trees are cleared to add ridiculous houses. The tally of what is missing keeps growing and there is no calculus in which this equation can balance. 

And I–who have more why than I need–think I am bulletproof, so I start reading the latest issue of Sierra Club magazine. I stumble from tropical deforestation to dying coral reefs until I fall from the height of my hubris and land right there with her, watching my why whirl out of my body with the dirty shower water, stained with sadness because I know what I don’t want to know: it all funnels up to me, the American consumer, sitting atop the world’s most destructive pyramid scheme. I feel trapped in a role I don’t want to play. 

And then I found you, Andrea! You make poetry from panic attacks and wanting to die. You share how death moved into your body and somehow you kept opening to bloom. I want to show my sad daughter this paradox is possible. I play her your poems. She likes them even though she doesn’t like poetry. It changes nothing. She still has no why. She tells me death is what surrounds her, because she doesn’t see anyone around who is actually saying NO to anything as long as there is free shipping. 

Her counter attack leaves me slain and speechless, so I run outside to see my whys. Ever faithful, they meet me in the gentle trickle of a mossy mountain stream, in the umami of autumn-cooled earth, in the golden aspen leaves that tickle and dance in the tiny breeze. I squeeze my entire being into these moments, but my daughter’s world view remains. 

Oh Andrea, this doesn’t sound like a love letter after all, but a cry for help from a passionate student of the School of Love and Leave No Trace who will never graduate because no matter how lightly I try to travel, my footprints are everywhere. I see my big boot on the back of an enslaved Thai fisherman and the aching feet of an exhausted Amazon warehouse picker and staining the soul of every hopeful immigrant who left their oppressive country only to land as kindling in the insatiable furnace of the American economy. Despite our democratic declarations, we are still the people who killed and enslaved more than 60 million humans to get what we wanted. 

But maybe it is a love letter because love is the only way to endure another day of Range Rovers and $300,000 weddings. I must point like a prophet to everything that is still here and call it by name: Rocky Mountains, wild rivers, grandparent pines, aspen families, bugling elk, wandering white clouds, sky that hurts my eyes and coyotes who cry, cry, cry.

I tell her to do the same and she hits me with the sucker punch and says, “The question isn’t can I. I know I can, but WHY? That’s my question, Mom. Why?” Is a sky full of stars not reason enough? Or a glistening alpine tundra rising above a gaggle of golding aspens and emerald spruce? OK, then, what about a family that will never recover from your absence and will live in the shadow of what is missing every single day for the rest of their lives?

A love letter shouldn’t ask, it should admire, it should, well, love. And I do. I love your fight and your frailty, your honor and your honesty, your surrender and your showing up, pen in hand, ready to call it as you see every side at once with your Andrea kaleidoscope glasses. 

I am rambling now, as love letters are want to do, but there is still the WHY. If love means seeing what’s missing and pointing to what is still there, what if we do that out loud? Your nitro poetry leads the way, a strong brew that flavors the tang of truth with enough sweet beauty that we delight in the drinking. Can we become a chorus of voices loud enough to break the glass bubble of denial most Americans live in? Or at least, maybe we can find each other in the dark and hold the echo of our united hearts.

All my love,
Karen