Maria came into the house from her studio yesterday afternoon, and I thought she looked odd. “Are you okay?,” I asked. She said she wasn’t okay, she wondered sometimes if a part of her was missing, if there was something wrong with her because she had never wanted to have children. Maria, the sweetest and most generous human I have ever known, has these moments, sometimes, where she decides there is something wrong with her, when she trashes herself as being unworthy or defective. They are happening much less frequently than before, but they are still sad to see.
I told Maria there was nothing wrong with her, there was nothing missing. She is full of love, I pointed out, for me, her friends, for the dogs, the donkeys, the chickens. Every morning, I said, she brings tasty and carefully chosen left over food out to the chickens in a bowl – in the heat, the rain, the snow. The donkeys get one too.
“Who cares if you love a chicken?,” she asked.
I admit this threw me, for a minute, because I don’t love chickens all that much myself, but I admire Maria for the love she brings to all of the living things in her world, animal and human. Last week, she hugged and kissed a tree in the woods, and then made a beautiful hanging piece in honor of the moment.
Love is important, I said, and then I thought it might be interesting if love were really an infectious disease, and it spread whenever one person came in contact with another person who had it. If every act of love – loving a human, an employee, a stranger, a waitress, a chicken – spread the disease, and it even infected governors, Facebook posters and Washington politicians.
It would be controversial for sure. Hate would fight back, so would rage and argument. And greed. Corporate CEO’s, animal rights activists, hedge fund managers, lobbyists, billionaires, governors and cable news hosts and media executives would be outraged, they avoid love at all costs. They and members of Congress would scramble, demanding quarantine for the people who loved, seek an antidote for it, try and ban them from entering or leaving the country to halt the spread love and compassion. They should be unselfish, they demanded, stay home and avoid contact with normal humans.
Government would rush into help. The CDC would rush to develop protocols for the spread of love, people would be asked at airports and doctor’s offices and hospital emergency rooms if they had felt or encountered love in the last few weeks of their lives. There would be much abundance and overabundance of caution. If love was encountered, contagious people had to put on a mask and get into a room by themselves, or go home for a month until they resumed yelling at their dogs and spouses and kids and wrote nasty messages on Facebook and Twitter. There would be how-to-handle love workshops all over the place.
Maybe love is not controllable. Maybe it would spread to panelists on cable news, who inexplicably started to listen to other points of view and empathize with people who differed with them. Maybe people on the “left” and people on the “right” would begin to think again and speak to one another.
The world might change if such a disease spread. Maybe animal rights protestors would stop shouting in the streets and help animals and the people who own them. Wars would end, prisons would empty, political conflicts would ease, the crime rate would plummet to unprecedented levels, sick people would not be bankrupted by staggering medical bills. Government would function again, leaders might lead. Corporations would lower their dividends instead of laying off their employees, men would stop despoiling the earth and the world’s economies, journalists would seek out the truth and perspective, people online would only say nice and supportive things to one another, even when they disagreed.
Yes, I told Maria, it is important to love a chicken, the idea just might be infectious and spread.