A Love Story, 80 Years and Counting

A friend of mine, a child psychologist, had never protested anything in her life. But when she saw families being separated at the US-Mexico border, she understood — as a therapist — that this would be a lifelong trauma. So she did something that took enormous courage for her. She made a sign and went to stand at the intersection in our small town where five roads meet. She got mixed reviews, as you can imagine. But she came home and wrote a beautiful editorial, and her final line was: What is your line in the sand? What would cause you to risk doing something you've never done?

Now, that's a big question. I sat with it all weekend. Years earlier, I'd been part of an anti-war group at Davidson College, where I worked. We made protest signs and published a booklet. But we discovered that being anti-war was causing wars on campus — it was an argument, not a path to peace. So the group regrouped and asked: what could we advocate and practice that would actually eliminate the war? And we came to love. That was the word. If we taught that, lived that, then maybe we'd never need the protest signs again.

I was still thinking about my friend's question when my grandchildren came to visit that weekend. I asked them — knowing my life, knowing my stories — what would I put on a sign? They didn't hesitate. That's easy, they said. It's "love". They made my first "LOVE" sign that afternoon.

The next Wednesday, I went to stand where my friend Erica had stood the week before. She arrived too, with her protest sign. I thought, well, this is going to be interesting — the two of us, side by side. She looked at me. She looked at my sign. Then she laid hers down, crossed the street, and said: If your sign works, I'll never need mine.

She went home. She hasn't been back. That was nearly nine years ago. I've missed twice — once with a horrible case of first-wave COVID, and once when I was being operated on for cancer. But otherwise, it's certainly been the most disciplined I've ever been at anything.

~ An Energy Transfer ~

I live in a mountain town of about seven thousand people, near Asheville, North Carolina. Lots of churches. Everything from Buddhist to really fundamental Christian. Every Wednesday afternoon, a few of us stand at that intersection with our love signs while twelve or fifteen hundred cars pass through. Someone counted once. It's a lot of people.

Now, this isn't a performance, and it's not about us. We don't chat and visit. We gather ourselves in the spirit, and then we offer it — through eye contact, through a wave, one person at a time. I've insisted on the eye contact. It's like shaking a hand. It's purposeful. It's an energy transfer from us to the person in the car. When I'm in the grocery store, people will come up and say, You didn't look at me on Wednesday. With fifteen hundred people, sometimes I miss someone. But they notice. Because when you make eye contact, it's real. It's standing in front of someone and saying: we're connected.

People always share love stories with me afterward — in the produce aisle, at the post office. Never the opposite. Not once in all these years. A five-year-old showed up one Wednesday with her mother and asked if they could stand with us. I said of course, we have extra signs. That little girl looked up at me and said, I've wanted to do this my whole life! She's five. She stood for the full hour with that sign, just waving. She hasn't been back. She just needed to do it once.

~ The Girl Who Was Watching ~

But here's what the sign really taught me: once you hang "LOVE" around your neck, you have to live it. It becomes an every-minute-of-the-day reminder. You can't advocate for it if you're not going to practice it. And it's hard. It's not an easy thing.

A man stopped one day with his wife and four children. The family went to talk with other folks in our group, but he stayed with me, his twelve-year-old daughter beside him. His opening volley was: You must be liberal. I said, How do you know that? He said, Only liberals talk about love.

Now, I've got this thing I call verbal Aikido. When something hard comes at me, I watch it approach, catch it in my hand, let it pass through my heart before I answer. So I said: Well, you must be liberal too — because here we are, talking about love. He didn't know what to do with that. Then he tried to catch me with Bible verses. Well, I grew up in the South. I went to Sunday school. I could talk with him through all of it, and all of it went through the heart.

But here's the thing I realized minutes into that conversation. His daughter wasn't listening to the words. She was watching me. She was watching whether I was love — or just holding a sign that said it. Had I been anything else, anything other than what was written around my neck, I would have had no credibility.

When she left, she turned around and smiled. And I thought: we were there for her.

~ Carousel Queen, Community Outcast ~

People ask how I came to organize my life around love. The truth is, I didn't plan it. But I've known since I was three years old that I didn't feel like other people. I was tall, big, serious, full of mystical experiences I couldn't share. I was always called a Pollyanna — that was the era's way of dismissing someone who took goodness seriously.

In high school, I was nominated for a competition that judged how you looked, how you thought, and the grades you made. They asked every candidate what they wanted most in the world, and everyone said world peace — because that's what you said in those days. I said it too. Except the judges called me back afterward and said: You know why you won? Because you had a plan. And I did. I'd already been living a small version of it.

And then I was pregnant at seventeen. Went straight from carousel queen to community outcast. My physics teacher, who I adored and would have done anything for, never spoke to me again. Nobody wanted the story. Nobody was curious. They just wanted me to be the failure that fit their story. But I knew it would pass. I knew kind people would find me. And I knew it would form me — that I would never again assume I understood anyone from the outside.

Because I was innocent. But I was guilty until proven innocent. And you know what? It was perfect. It kept me in college for all the right reasons. It made me be a mother early and learn through being a mother. It taught me I could stick to things without being invested in them — which turns out to be one of the most useful things a person can learn.

~ You Have a Lineage ~

I spent thirty years at Davidson College, starting as a secretary and ending as a dean — which could never happen now, because I didn't have advanced degrees. But it was a different time. I grew up in that place. I became the first director of their Bonner Scholars program — a national service-learning initiative I got to adapt for Davidson — and I insisted we meet every student personally, four times a year, and ask not how many hours they'd served but who they were becoming through service. Because we can't do service without loving the people we're serving, and being changed ourselves. The students made fun of me at first. Called me the Queen of Cheese because I had them hold hands in a circle. I wore a cheese hat and claimed the title. I mean, we have to be light about this. By the third year, they were calling the circle themselves. By the fourth year, they were teaching it to other schools.

Years later, through what I can only call magic, I ended up in Calcutta at Mother Teresa's mother house. It was a hundred degrees. Mass was in Hindi. I was the biggest person there, sitting on the floor, the only one sweating, panicking about what on earth I was going to say to this woman. When I got to the front of the line, she was bent nearly double with age, her eyes looking up from beneath. She took my hand and said, "What is your name, dear?"

And I thought with relief: okay, that's a question I can answer. 

"Ruth," I said. And she said: "Oh — you have a lineage. Go live it."

The biblical Ruth — a story of love that isn't demanded but freely given, of community found in the most unexpected places. I was named for my grandmother, who was the least biblical person I ever knew but the most community-minded. Her mother was a suffragette. The lineage runs deep, even when it comes sideways.

~ What the Storm Remembered ~

When Hurricane Helene came through our mountains — we'd never had a hurricane in the mountains — the rivers crested thirty-five feet above normal. We lost ten billion trees. They say it'll be a hundred years before the land recovers. It was stunning.

My house wasn't damaged, but people around me lost everything. So I went to the FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) lines and stood at the back, and I listened. People were angry, scared, heartbroken. By the time they got to the front of the line, most were in tears. There wasn't anyone around to hear it — to witness. So I did that for a couple of weeks. Just stood with people.

And what I found was that without fail, buried inside every story of loss, there was a kind of miraculous love story. People had saved one another's lives. Strangers were feeding whole neighborhoods. Folks from Louisiana rode horses up into the mountains and pulled people out of streams. I mean, it was stunning — the outpouring from people who just didn't owe us anything. And for three months, nobody asked who you voted for. It simply wasn't relevant.

Now, a year and a half later, we've worked at forgetting that. We've gone back to being separate. So we've begun collecting love stories from the time when we were helping each other — because I think remembering might knit us back together with something deeper than our divisions.

~ The Bonus Round ~

I'm about to turn eighty. I've had cancer twice. I live in a six-hundred-square-foot solar home that's honestly more space than I need. I call this part of my life the bonus round. And I'll tell you something about getting older: nobody pays that much attention to old people. Which means you can get by with a lot. I intend to push that limit.

The other day, a quote arrived in my mailbox with no signature, no return address — just a passage from the Dalai Lama: Every day, think as you wake up: today I am fortunate to have woken up. I am alive. I have a precious human life. I am not going to waste it. I could read that every morning for the rest of my life and be satisfied. Who sends something like that? I can't wait to find out.

One of the bravest things you'll ever do is keep your heart open in a world that gives you every reason to shut it.

People ask how I've managed not to become cynical. I have absolute trust in what presents itself. And patience is essential. I think it really is about practicing — and not berating yourself when you don't do it perfectly, or when you do the total opposite. I have a huge, forgetful heart. That's a grace, not a failure. It means I get to begin again every day. 

If you drive through my town on a Wednesday afternoon, you might see us — a few dedicated souls on the corner, signs around our necks, waving to every car that passes. It's the biggest shot of joy you can imagine, because it's a sacred offering, really. It's our chance to change the air around where we are. Standing still, in one place, with LOVE, and meaning it. 

I think a lot of people already know that love is possible to live by. They're just waiting for someone to stand there and remind them.