In her 43^rd Sonnett, Elizabeth Barret Browning counted the ways she loved her lover. Her love, she wrote, was beyond the reach of the soul and yet inclusive of breath, smiles, and all of life. Her sonnets penned a far-reaching love that promised to do more than we can imagine and that was to love her lover even better after death. In many ways, all women are Elizabeth Barret Browning, and it is one reason I love women. And can we speak of the ways we love women?

I’m just a man trying to do the best he can, and I want to know if it’s ok to count the ways too. I will speak of and count the ways because women never quit on love. Women remember every act of love and they are determined to bring, bear, and carry it to the grave and beyond. How can I (we men) not love women? How can we not count the ways – death will not stop them or their love – if we are still able to count our breaths? Let me count the ways and speak of something in the way women move me to love them.

How do I love women that I adore, admire, hold dear, and treat tender like the night? Can I speak of the human women I know, the women I dream of and think of? And can I count the ways I love in these beings I see and hear and touch? Let me speak of the ways, O man.

Are you with me?

I count as one man, and yet I am every man. And all of us are all Paul McCartney. “Something in the way she moves,” McCartney sang. Yes, it’s not just something that attracts me in the way a professional ballet dancer moves, her pas de deux, an exceptional and heightened reflection of partnership, but there is enchantment in the way all women move.

I love that women abhor violence, and I love their overwhelming connection to life that defines their every gaze, every word, every action. Every woman I know reaches out to life and others with generative maturity signaled by open hands and hearts aflame. Their hope for peace and connection is anchored in hips, backs, and breasts. Their minds and bodies are vehicles of heart and peace runs through their blood as the deep contrary to violence.  I love women for their unfettered embrace of caring, and I, along with Elizabeth Barret Browning, will count the ways.

I love my daughters and more women too. I see their energy and I see it in all women, and I love them for it. Both are in their third decade now, and like all women I know, my daughters are working hard to make their way in this world. Their energy is life as they burst forth and take adult roles to new levels: mother, community builder, activist, leader, protector, animal caretaker, teacher, employee, communicator, and beloved. They are out there putting themselves on the line to serve and save. They are all women, hoping for more and yet giving it all up, even for a “smile and a shoeshine.”

My bloodline and my genetic remnants live in my daughters, and I dearly love them. More than my life itself, they are my heart and always have been. Like all women, they are intelligent and insightful, and I love that in them. My daughters, like all women I know and love, speak of things they cannot know – and yet they do know – and like all women they always catch the drift.

They are often kind enough to refrain from telling me how I’ve missed it. Yes, they can identify bear scat in the woods of an American northern state, but they can also diagnose why a child is sick and speak in languages that hint at great learning and effort. They care for life and like all women, they communicate with a peaceful intent that serves a broken world. I love women for that too, don’t you, O Man?

I love and admire women because they are always alert, even a little cautious. I always thought it was because they were wary of danger, but now I know they are staying alert to situations where they can help. They are listening, always, deeply listening for the faint cry of a child in danger. And the reason they listen is that they want to step in and help. They do, and I love women for it.

I love and admire women because they do many things, and always, what they are doing is work. The woman works, doesn’t she? She always works, doesn’t she? She knows work is life. I don’t hear her whine or complain about it. She knows how to give to others, how to raise the valleys and lower the mountaintops, and she knows how to rest when pushing could ruin everything.

I love women because they bow down to enter the child’s world. They will not stand and demand the child enter theirs but stoop and bend low to embrace a child’s wisdom, beauty, and truth. I love women because they – like the children they admire and protect – are wise, beautiful, and truthful.

And listen to me? What do I know? I am nobody, just a man trying to do the best he can, just a man trying to love a woman, trying to live in this land. I’m just a man trying to be . . . just like you, too?

And can I keep counting and speaking of the ways?

I love the way women care for themselves and it’s most clear in the way women care for their hair. I never see a woman in public with bad hair. Bad hairstyles, sure. Bad color, sure. But it’s always coifed and combed.

I love women for the way they eat an avocado and call it good enough.

I love the way women ask questions and listen for the answers.

I love women when they talk to me, and when they see me.

When I see a gleam in the eyes of women, I love looking into that gleaming: it’s a deep world that is shining, questioning, probing, evaluating, valuing, and loving. They speak with their eyes and listen with their smile.

I love women because they can and do listen, can and do see, can and do speak, can and do peer out from the places deep in that gleaming, and I see it in their eyes just as they hear me through their smiles and in my smile.

I love women because they are music. They are not Saraswati with white swans in her river or golden orbs in her orbit. How can they be? They do not hold the Vedas in their hands or mala beads on their wrists, and not all women sing with perfect pitch or play the veena. But they attend the solitary note with holy intent, they attend the song with soul dance, they listen to the silence between the notes and hold it close. I love Saraswati, the Creatrix, and I love women because they are living incarnations of Saraswati.

They are music, and sans golden orbs, wear crowns of bundled birch branches on their heads as Queens of the Cosmos; I love women for they are music, they are the rhythm of life, they are song, they give measure and melody, time and beat to both tortoise and hare, they are patterns and tones, and they sing into being all life in the highest of vibrations.

I love listening to women when they sing, and when they do, I turn into a string on an instrument. I become a coil twisting on the wind to their melody, expanding and contracting with their breath while their melodies and rhythms power my heart and lungs. These rhythms turn into melodies stirring the biology and spirit that is me. Is it you, O Man? And shall we go on?

I love women as their voice rattles the inner coiled serpent of my deep masculine. The serpent unwinds in my core and a dance explodes in me. Twice women have awakened that serpent in me, and when it uncoiled inside me like royal rock and roll, my soul burst forth and fueled me with power and life for 10 years or more.

Speaking of the ways . . . I love the way women laugh and the way their smiles and laughter light up a room.

I love the bodies of women and the sex of and with women. I love their sex and scent, their pure energy and light, their smile and sensuality. I love the curves of their bodies and the emotions they raise in me. I love the soulful core of women. I love their energy animating all life far beyond the Adamic curse.

I love the way women see beauty in everything.

I love the way women paint their fingers and toes.

I love the way women feel to my touch, the way they react to my touch.

I love the way women pay attention to details.

I love the way women wear rings: shooting stars and moons clipped onto toes, on the nose, on ears, on belly buttons, on their labia, tongues, nipples, and fingers. Is there more?

I love the way women complement the simple things.

I love the way women give, and even, maybe especially, without thanks or appreciation from others, they keep giving.

I love the way women receive and accept what life gives. And if they are with a “no damn good man,” who hurts them, then I love and affirm the way women fight back.

I love the way women share vulnerabilities and doubts. They are freer to speak and seek support than men. I love and respect the way women ask for help. Women endure and even love bad men even as they enhance all men.

I love the way women catch the drift and the tide.

I love women and the way they naturally tune in and turn life’s rough-hewn angles into something that moves toward civility and charity, so that life itself, motivated by respect and honor, bows down to their will.

And don’t I love women?

And don’t you love women?

And don’t they deserve everything . . . except a bad man?

Death notwithstanding, Browning wrote, I will make my love count beyond the grave.

Men can pledge to do that, and while men are good at making pledges – women keep them – but I will pledge to all of you that I admire you, I love you, I will stand beside you and protect you.

In graduate school, a professor asked those of us in the classroom to make a list of all the things in our lives that were “good enough.” He said, “Things that are good enough, really are good enough.” I wrote that my car was good enough, a beat-up Ford Mustang that frequently didn’t start. I wrote that my guitar was good enough, an old Ovation six string that struggled to stay in tune. I wrote that my wife was good enough. She was, and this caused me to look at me.

To me, women are good enough just as they are. Women do not need to be Saraswati to feed the soul; women do not need to be Pele to fire the volcano of love; women do not need to furl the sea or give breath as Eve, they are good enough as themselves.

Women do not need to be divine, because to me, their humanity is a lovely and profound divinity that’s good enough. I love women in their pure, bold, and good enough humanity.

And don’t we, O man, love a woman?

And don’t I, O man, love a woman?

And will we count the ways? And will we speak of the ways, O man?

And O man, how do we, how do I, love women?

Count the ways, O man,

and make the ways count.

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ONE DAY, I will write on why I love men too, and for that task, I’d start with another spokesperson. The masculine poet of love, and passionate inclusivist Walt Whitman embraced all men with an unabashed and far-reaching love as he strove to take the masculine exact measure. But Whitman, in a daring reach far beyond what I can abide, stacked man up against the gods:

Taking myself the exact dimensions of Jehovah and laying them away

Lithographing Kronos and Zeus his son, and Hercules his grandson

Buying drafts of Osiris and Iris and Belus and Brahma and Adonai

In my portfolio placing Manitou loose and Allah on a leaf and the crucifix engraved

With Odin, and the hideous-faced Mexitil, and all idols and images.

Whitman stacks his Civil War men up against the gods, and why not, they lived through Hell. But I cannot pit woman against the goddesses. They are good enough as they are.

 

*I wrote this because of an Instagram Post by Monica Mesa Dasi called, “I Love Men.” It was affirming and inspiring to me.

I decided to follow her footsteps by writing my I love women post and that’s how this submission came about. I also think this was a good consciousness-raising work for me and I submit it would be for all men. If a man sits down to write about why he loves women and then struggles mightily to find something to say, he may have to take a look at why.