Dear friends,

In the early months of 2017, I experienced romantic love for the first time. Being the ripe age of 31, it had felt like a long while coming, and I’d built quite a few expectations as to how it would play out. But the reality didn’t quite match the picture I’d been fed. While I was taken by this man (and all of his magnificence), it wasn’t like I’d suddenly found my missing puzzle piece. In fact, there were more pieces now, and they didn’t always click with mine.

Initially it was disorienting, but every now and then—when my expectations softened—I got a glimpse into the deeper place where the staying power was coming from. I could see that he was both familiar and a mystery to me, someone I felt safe to be vulnerable with and excited to keep getting to know. He was his own puzzle, I realised, and I was mine—the love is what was making us visible to one another and willing to share in each other’s journeys.

This issue is all about that deeper place where love and connection happens—be it romantic love, familial or the love of nature and the universe. It’s about how we show up to one another, and acknowledge the role we personally play in how our relationships grow and stumble. Love, in this way, isn’t just what we get out of our relationships, it’s what we put in—a choice we make about the kind of companions we want to be in the world.

Therapist Esther Perel says it perfectly: “The quality of our relationships determines the quality of our lives.” Through her best-selling books and podcasts, she’s opened a vital public discourse on our sexual lives, and brings healing to thousands of relationships by helping people connect with the deepest parts of their stories.

Anthropologist Helen Fisher studies the neural pathways that light up when we experience love, and says the better we understand the mind, the better we understand how we relate.

An icon of our postmodern era, actress Miranda July has built a legion of fans for her thought-provoking depictions of life and belonging. She makes art that connects strangers, and helps people feel less alone in the world by reimagining the mundane as a source of contemplation and vitality.

Having spent decades working in palliative care, Stephen Jenkinson delivers deep wisdom on dying well and experiencing the fullness of our days.

And in sharing her incredible story of motherhood and grief, Rachel Callander shows us a kind of love that empowers others and can be felt beyond words.

In the middle of the magazine is a piece on self-love by the late-German psychologist Erich Fromm. “The love of my own self,” he writes, “is inseparably connected with the love for any other being.” It’s a powerful reminder that, in order to build the kind of enduring, constructive relationships that this time calls for, we need first of all to be in good relationship with ourselves.

So make time and space to fall in love with yourselves, friends—go to that place where kind relationships flourish. Our collective healing, and the healing of the planet, might just depend on it.

Happy reading,
With love,

Team Dumbo Feather xox