Ep 76: What Is Love?

Welcome to the For Love and Money podcast, the show where business and social purpose meet to inspire a movement for positive change. Here's your host, Carolyn Butler-Madden. This week, we have a special episode for you that I'm really excited to share with you. What is Love? is a book featuring unconventional love stories from a global community of writers. And today we're celebrating the launch of that book. So I'll give you a bit of a backstory.

A couple of years ago, I did Bernadette G. Waugh's Story Skills course, brilliant course, and after completing it, I joined Story Republic, a community of global storytellers who had all completed the same course. Now, I'm not exaggerating when I say it has been a life-changing experience for many reasons, not least the incredible individuals who I've had the great fortune to get to know through the community.

Reading and listening to the stories of others in the community has enriched my own storytelling skills, but also it's enriched my life in ways I hadn't imagined before. And it's given me something solid at a time when the world feels very off-kilter. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in the community in feeling that way. This morning, I attended one of the events that is hosted by Michael Avril, one of the community members.

It was the one-year anniversary on Valentine's Day of a live story performance event. You're going to hear more about this from Rumi, one of my guests on this episode. But this morning, as I sat in this online event and listened to the performers telling their stories, I found myself laughing, crying, and feeling so incredibly bonded to these people who I've never met in real life. What can I say? Stories are the key to connection.

And they're the key to emotion. So What Is Love came out of that very first performance event that we were celebrating the one-year anniversary of today. I'll let Rumi, my guest, tell you a bit more about that. That book has come out of it, and that book is the book we're celebrating today, What is Love? What is Love features such a diverse array of stories about love with contributors from all over the world.

I was delighted to be one of them. And if you read this book, which I hope, I really hope you do, it is such a beautiful little book and it is stunning. And the stories in it will just get you thinking in so many different ways. Some of them are so unexpected. affected. So what is love? It's a huge question, isn't it? And think about that question being posed to you and writing about it. Today, I'm interviewing the editor and some of the contributors to this book.

And my hope is that you get a bit of a sense of the beauty of humanity that I think has been captured within it, as well as a sense of this incredibly beautiful community. Enjoy. So, it gives me great pleasure to kick off by introducing you to Rumi Tsuchihashi, who is a Story Republic member and she was the editor for this new book, What is Love? So, Rumi, welcome to the For Love and Money podcast.

Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to this chat first with you as editor to share some of your insights in this whole experience and then we're going to bring in some of the contributors but to kick off I'd love to ask you Rumi what do you think is the role of love and I'm going to extend the question that I normally ask in business and all the wider world today. The role of love It is the foundation. It's the touchstone. It's the place we go back to, like, what do we do anything for?

I think love is the underestimated motivator. Behind all of our actions, business and otherwise, and those businesses that consciously harness that, I think, can use business as a vehicle for doing good things in the world. Yeah, and I think, thank you for that. And I think, I think, particularly when we think about this book and this book today, it's never been more important to talk about this.

And to ask people, to invite people to think about it, to think about love, not just in business, just people, right? Just people. You know, there's so much division. And, yeah, I think this book couldn't have come at a better time. I agree. Rumi, could you share a little bit about your backgrounds and how you came to join Story Republic? Sure. Today, I am the author of three essay collections, all taking a look inside the tiny moments we tend to overlook.

So book one was just looking at life in general and memories that are precious to me. And my latest book was looking into the moments that inside of my recent marriage, I got married for the second time last year, and the evolution of the relationships, of those things that I want to remember. And I think that kind of romantic love is what most people think of when they think looking at love. And yet it is so much more expansive. I got to share an essay globally through the New York Times.

I say it, call it an essay, but it's only 100 words. It doesn't matter how many words, that's amazing. The tiny, my favorite column in the New York Times is the Modern Love column. And within that, there's a section called the Tiny Love Stories. And a piece that I submitted to that was published in 2023. And that was a foundational moment for me of recognizing what love feels like.

And it was a very small interaction with my grandfather. so when i was tapped to be the editor for this book it it felt like a culmination of the things i had been working on in the last five years story republic or the story skills course that i that i took that led to me joining this ongoing community of storytelling came at a pivotal moment when I was I had to just turn 50 and it was a moment where either I was going to take my own story seriously and cultivate them

craft them share them with the world or not I felt like if I didn't do it now I was never going to do it and it would become a lifelong regret so it that course came to me at a time where I had decided to lean in and the people that I met came into that at that time, and I could not have imagined that since that time that I would be invited to edit a book on such a beautiful and important subject. Thank you. And there's a few things in there I want to pick up.

Your essay collections and we'll put links in the show notes to those collections. The one you just talked about, about your marriage, I started reading it and I made to read one chapter. You know, I didn't have that much time and there was things I had to get done, but I thought, no, I just, I was curious and I wanted to read that one chapter and it drew me in and I consumed the whole of part one in one sitting and in the end I had to go and do what I had to do.

But it's beautiful and the way you write is absolutely beautiful and just draws the reader in. It's those little moments that capture so much. So, yeah, first of all, I wanted to say that And yes, to our listeners, go and have a look, but carve out a bit of time before you start reading, because I think the same will happen to you. You mentioned 30-50. And I just wanted to say, because it just seems to be a common theme.

I don't know, is it 50 and fierce? that as we get older, and that seems to be a pivotal moment, I see so many women coming into their own and just kind of going, bugger it. Now or never, right? And I think that's where we cast off a lot of the caring what other people think about us. And of course, you continue to, but not to the degree that perhaps we've carried with us, many of us, for so long.

So congratulations on that. And the essay you mentioned for the New York Times, is that the piece that you shared in the book, in the introduction?

In what is actually it's it it is not it is the same grandfather yeah but the book the story that i shared the introduction which i will read later is a moment that preceded once i wrote the story with that i thought was my genesis of understanding love is i realized that there was one underneath it that was not even a conscious memory because this story is one that I was very little. I was not even a year old. So I knew the story from what my parents had remembered.

It was a story about me, but not from my direct memory.

And yet it shaped what I thought of myself, who I thought i was how deserving of love i felt i was it's amazing when you really unpack how the stories that are imposed on you about you become our stories and our identities so it was getting writing the other story and publishing it that led me to dig even deeper and look for an opportunity to pivot the point of view of a memory that was essentially imposed on me because i. I was a character, but it was not my experience.

Oh, gosh, I reckon that is worthy of a whole podcast episode on its own. That idea that other people impose their perspectives of us and we take them on without even thinking about it sometimes. And then, you know, by rewriting that story and looking at it from a different perspective, how we can change. And stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are the most important stories in the world today, aren't they?

Yes. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves is a topic I'm really passionate about. And I think organically how examining that became such a central activity amongst all the contributors to this book. And I say that in that there's such an earnest turning of the facets of our stories that I saw everyone engage in and re-examine familiar stories through our new perspective.

And it was almost like a whole large group therapy session to be in the creative process of this for all of us to go, oh, wait a minute. I don't think, I will be speaking for everybody by saying this, but I don't think there's a single one of us who came out of this who didn't feel like we shed some weight, a burden of a misaligned story about ourselves that we'd been carrying, A story that wasn't all the way true, if true at all.

And to be able to set that weight down, or at least look at it from a fresh eye. There was a sigh of collective relief that I felt. And that's what I hope this book is already doing out in the world, will continue to do. When you opened up, Carolyn, with why this book is so important right now, I think with each person going, wait a minute, I'm carrying a story about myself.

I'm telling myself a story about myself that doesn't feel all the way right and to have the permission to look at that and to shift it each of those shifts i think is just a little tiny vote for world peace love that i love that let me ask you actually i want to go back just briefly because I'd love you to share how this idea of the anthology came about. Sure. So it came in multiple ways.

Story Republic has a founder and a community manager to Enrica Greathouse and Bernadette Giola who organized this community together. And unbeknownst to me, they had been talking about, oh, wouldn't it be nice to take these stories that we see in this community and share it with the world through a book. And around the time that that conversation had been intensifying in the background, another community member of ours, Michael Averill, had organized a telling session.

And by that, I mean it's people come on a live Zoom call from around the world, and we each have five minutes to tell a true story. And the very first one he organized, What is Love, was the theme. And it was such an electric experience for us to come together that both the group of participants who shared a story and the audience and Bernadette and Erika thought this is the moment, this is the theme.

And I was lucky enough to be tapped to be the person to, will you bring this energy together in the form of a book? So I said yes, and here we are. Love it. So as editor of this book, I imagined you would have had some kind of vision of the end result. Was the outcome anything like you imagined? Wow, that's a good question. Yes. Yes, in the really subtle ways.

I imagine that the book you hold would be really beautiful, like a physically beautiful object that you would just want to hold close to your chest. There's something gentle and yet powerful. So I had that as a vision. I imagined it feeling very calm.

Diverse and the kinds of the voices and that's reflective art community we have diverse geographically participants from all over the world so I really imagine that there would be a global point of view so that those were the things that I thought it would be and that it would just feel very honest like there's there's an energy of honesty the people are telling me the truth feeling that we get when we encounter something that's written from the heart.

So that was the vision. And yes, we accomplished that. That's beautiful. And yeah, for me, again, reading that book, it was because it's, you know, a range of short stories and you can just get drawn in. And what I loved was the diversity of stories. It's like surprising stories about subjects. You know, it's not that, just that obvious mold of love. There's some of that, but it's the diversity that is so beautiful and prompts you to think about love in a more expansive way.

Yeah. Yes. We felt that in the live session that came out even more powerfully, the diversity of ways that we can look at love, experience love. I think that was amplified in the book, and that was absolutely delightful. So I'm going to ask you to read the little essay that you included in the introduction, please. Absolutely. So in the introduction of the works, first I started out with how difficult it is to define love. So I'll skip that part, Let's skip ahead a little bit and start it here.

Having edited this book, the one thing I know for sure about love is we make sense of it through our stories. Take this example. It's July at the beach, two hours west of Tokyo. A young mother wearing a wide-brimmed hat arrives, carrying an enormous mesh bag in one arm and a baby in the other. The rest of the family is a step behind her. She chooses a suitable spot and sets the 10-month-old down to spread a blanket. Immediately, things go wrong. The baby girl takes off.

Like a newly hatched sea turtle, she crawls toward the ocean, wobbly, but with all her might. Mom fetches the baby. Baby takes off. After several rounds of this and no progress on laying the blanket, mom's fuse gets short. The father steps in with a solution. He'll take the baby to the water's edge and hold her up by the armpits. The idea is a hit. The baby giggles, squeals, and splashes her toes. The father returns to the spot triumphantly, but his daughter isn't done playing in the waves.

She crawls away from the blanket at ten times the original speed. Now, dad's got flared nostrils. The mood is tense. Oji-chan, the grandfather, lifts a hand to say, allow me. He walks behind the fast-crawling baby but doesn't pick her up. Not even when she reaches the shore, or when the first wave splashes her face. He lets her continue for a second or two longer. When he does lift the baby out of the water, he doesn't walk her back to the blanket.

He takes five steps back and lets the little girl crawl in again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. end. For decades, I thought this cringy, formative story I heard on repeat was about what a pain in the ass I was from day one. But then I re-examined it through the lens of, what is love? And everything changed. Suddenly, I experienced the story through the eyes of Ojichen, a man lit up by a ground child's love of the ocean at first sight.

I felt his palpable delight and the tedium of creating guardrails for a curious spirit. If this isn't love, I don't know what is, I thought with wet eyes, my body limp with relief and gratitude. So beautiful. That is so beautiful. Thank you so much, Rumi. And thank you for creating such a safe space for all of us who share our stories. I know for mine, I was not sure whether to do it or not. And, yeah, the way you managed that was great.

And I'm sure you would have had that experience with many others. So thank you. And thank you for taking the time to come and share some of your insights here. It's my pleasure. I can't wait for the listeners to hear the computer stories. Like I said, it's the multifacetedness and the way everyone just really showed up with courage to turn their stories over. You'll see that theme over and over again. And it was really one of my favorite parts of editing this book.

And I'm excited for the listeners to experience it. Beautiful. So we have with us Leanne Fournier and Sabah Mewza. And I'm going to bring each of them in individually and ask them to share a little bit about themselves and their story as well. So Leanne, let's kick off with you. Welcome to the For Love and Money podcast. You'll have to unmute yourself. Thank you. Thank you for having me, Carolyn. I'm Leanne Forney.

I'm from Kenora, Ontario, Canada. So I'm in the deep depths of winter here right now. So the what is love stories are certainly warming my heart. And I enjoy reading. I'm a copywriter and a journalist here. I am a freelance writer, so I do write every day.

But since I joined the Story Republic a few years ago, that has taken on a kind of a new spectrum, finding a really safe space to share stories and true stories and fiction stories and the stories that come to me through many of the prompts we have as a group, but also the experiences in my life. If you'd like me to continue on, I can talk a little bit about my story. I'd love to hear from you on what drew you to Story Republic in the first place. What prompted you?

What was that moment where you were like, I'm in? Yeah, it came to me time-wise. I remember my husband and I were actually looking at launching a really brave new initiative that really sort of aligned with our values in a whole bunch of ways. And I kind of joined it to write about that company, but just found such a safe space to explore stories and creative writing. Because as I said, I write for a living every day, but it's not always the fun stuff and the heartfelt stuff.

And I just immediately found a place that I mentioned the word safe, where I just felt safety and love and beauty. And those are really important things for me in my life. And I kind of constantly search for those things. And I found them there and found a home and, you know, dove in then. And then when the Story Republic. Community was evolved out of kind of that.

And I'm sorry, I think I'm probably confusing things because I joined a course, first of all, that was the writing skills with Burnett Jiwa and then moved into Story Republic from there. And yeah, it was just a great fit for me at the time where I was starting to write a lot of poetry and certainly during the pandemic wrote a lot of poetry and found a safe place to share that.

And just to emerge as a writer in a new way, it was just a great great place to do it it's amazing isn't it you talked about safety love and beauty and when when you have that in an environment and in community of people it allows you to be yourself to be able to remove you know the layers that we pack on to protect ourselves and the more we can get to share who we truly are i don't know i just i just feel you grow as a human being and the whole community grows because it's catching.

It's catching. That's certainly what I've found, being part of this community, which is amazing. Leanne, I'd love you to share your story, to read your story to us. When you start thinking, what is love? And I imagine you would have been in that first story performance. I hadn't joined the community at that point, I don't think. But where does your mind go? Like, do you scan? Like, how did you land where you landed? I was terrified because I'm not actually a spoken word storyteller.

I'm more of a written word storyteller. But Michael, again, I was feeling safe and I knew the community would be around me and I was feeling very heard. And that was the one thing I didn't mention. It's really important to me is so much in our lifetime. You know, we feel people aren't seeing us and hearing us. And that's something that I think you experience in Story Republic. That's amazing. So for my particular story, I'm, like many of us, I have a lot of love around me.

Extremely lucky in that way. I have a person I've been with for 30 years and children and family, but I was stuck. And as I shared before, I was in the car with my mother and I was telling her, I was struggling to come up with this story, and we were driving to my parents' doctor's appointments. My parents live three hours away from me, so I drive and get them, and off we go. And my father was sitting in the back seat, and he's very quiet.

My dad has dementia, and dementia has stolen his voice in a way as well as his mind. And I'm not sure why, but my mother just started to talk. And I leaned in, and the burden... Her caring for him has always been worrisome for me, but she started to just, and I don't know why, to tell me their early love story.

And the fact that she could go there 65 years later with such clarity, and the love on her face as she was talking, and the way her face was lighting up, I leaned in and I listened, and I stayed quiet because I knew in that moment I'd found the story I was going to tell, and that I would love to be able to share this story with our community. So that's some of the background from where my story began. Would you like to share your story?

Absolutely. And I did want to actually credit Rumi for saying something that I wrote down because I was sharing a little bit more about my story. I wrote down that writing it, I was able to set the weight down I carried about my dad's alcoholism and his dementia and the worries I have about my mother carrying that burden. So I'll read it to you now. It's called Love is Like Peanut Brittle. My mother tells me she knew after their first date she was going to marry my father.

True, the cobalt blue of his shiny new 57 Chevy, which matched his eyes, may have been what first turned her head. But what she remembers more vividly was his kindness and charm. We fell into a relationship like we'd been friends our whole lives, she told me. I think I'm falling in love with you, he'd said early on. She didn't have to think about it. She already knew. When he knew for sure, he proposed with the only engagement ring in the store that would fit her tiny finger.

Well, he behaved with much bravito and made most of those decisions in those early days. And the morning of their wedding, he called over and over just to check, asking her, you're going to show up, right? She did show up, always showed up, and is still showing up 65 years later. Thinking back on their long marriage, it strikes me that their love is like peanut brittle, irresistible ambrosia becoming a sticky mess that melts into lingering sweetness.

It hasn't always been happily ever after. When my dad was 17, his father died, five years later, married to my mom with a new baby. He was scraping about out a living at the paper mill when his mother died too. We lived in a small town, a drinking town, and he fit right in. Much later, when I got up the courage, I asked him about that, why he drank so much, and he just, he said, I was mad. After my mom's death, so soon after my dad's, I was just so mad.

The anger was a smoldering fuse ignited often with alcohol. I spent many evenings of my youth riding my bike around town, tears streaming down my face after witnessing the dad I idolized slip away into a bottle. Yet for the most part, he held his demons at bay, working hard to become a mill boss. Pretty rare for a dumb guy like me, he would say. He was a good provider, a loving, caring father. When he wasn't drinking, I wanted for nothing. Well, except for a sober dad.

Like his father, he was a town leader involved in everything important to our small community. The hockey rink, the golf course, the fire department, even the church choir. He turned his failed pro hockey career into being a popular coach, teaching hundreds of kids how to skate. And the drinking, that was like his father's too, except it didn't kill him. The respect he earned for all of his contributions died pretty fast when he

hit the bottle. People can be quick to judge when they don't have all the facts. When he'd sober up, he'd work at making things right with my mom. But he never apologized to me. It wasn't hard for him to go back being the dad I'd always adored. He really didn't have to work at that. Didn't seem to think he needed my forgiveness. But I have forgiven him. When I was 16, he quit drinking. Then he quit drinking again. Then, long after we thought he'd finally quit drinking, he quit for good.

He is now sober, but my beloved dad is disappearing again. He is now sober, but a dimming of his mind is dulling his humor and blunting his laugh. He is now sober, but staggering steps and slurring words feel eerily familiar. My mother patiently answers the same questions over and over, hour after hour, day after day. Where are my shoes, my glasses, my paper, my lunch, he asks. But never thankfully, where are my memories of you?

He still always remembers her and she still always is there for him, which is what I recall from my childhood. My father struggling to do the right thing while fighting his demons. My mother offering her own steady resistance against those demons. She was never a pushover. She served my father like she did all of us with love and strength. My mother is fierce and loud. A mama bear who protected all of us when things got tough during my dad's drinking days. And now in his dementia.

With her wit, grit, and grace, she has always been the gale-force wind that carries our family long. and at 85, she still is. The gusts of her unconditional love are carrying me to the day when the weight of her responsibilities at the helm of our family falls to me. I hope I'll be ready when that day comes. I look into her eyes that I've seldom seen them bitter or resentful, rarely seen shadows of regret.

I ask her about her 60 plus years with my dad and what she recalls are those charming words, that first inkling of love, the honeyed kindness that drew her to him almost six and a half decades ago. Loving him hasn't been easy, and she is showing me, showing all of us, that retelling bitter stories isn't helpful. The truth is known, forgiven, and wrapped in the sweetness she has chosen to remember instead.

There isn't much time, just enough to sort through the last broken pieces and savor the sweet, salty, sticky mess that is love. Enjoying the podcast if you're looking for more inspiration head to our website thecauseeffect.com.au for more resources on how you can start using your business as a force for good or buy the for love and money book every copy sold allows us to protect one square meter of rainforest.

Leanne that was beautiful and you say you're a writer writer not a writer speaker that you spoke that beautifully in closing I'd love to closing for for your section I'd love you to share what did you get out of that process of writing that story I let the story take me where I wanted to go, which was really interesting process. I didn't tell it where it was going. It just went. And that was, I guess, the beauty of that live telling session. You know, we had the opportunity to do that.

But it brought me to a place of, as I said, you know, my mother's sort of showing us all what love is, right? And her enduring love for my dad through difficult times and the fact that it's continuing now. And they've both had recently, as others know, I've been lots of health concerns recently. And just appreciating, you know, that unconditional, endless love and believing it's possible for myself as well.

And then also wanting to, you know, as you mentioned, in these uncertain and difficult times, I just set myself a goal for this year is to live and love courageously. And that's what I'm doing. You know, and with the difficulties we have in the world, I think when we can do that and we can do it for one another, man, What a world we would have, right? Live and love courageously. I love that. Beautiful. And yes, what a world we would have if everybody could take a little bit of

that on in their lives. Thank you so much, Leanne, and thank you for sharing your beautiful, honest story with us. Thank you. Dabar, I would love to bring you in and ask me to introduce yourself to our listeners. Tell us a little bit about you, where you're from, your background, and what brought you to the Story Skills Workshop and ultimately Story Republic. Thank you. Thank you, Carolyn, for having this conversation with us and for inviting me in. So I was born and raised in Canada as well.

And I came to the States to study a long time ago now. And so my formal, you know, education, so to speak, formally at least, was in the areas of engineering and business. And then most of my adult working life, I'd say, after the education, before and after, was spent in corporate America. So it was only more recently that I started to recognize my own desire for more.

I mean, you talk about love and money in the workplace, and I think it was part of that desire that ultimately helped me decide that it was time to leave corporate America and do something on my own. And as part of that process during the pandemic, I was drawn to Story Republic. And so my interest in writing, you're asking who I am in my background, I was interested in writing. I dabbled in writing mostly in school as a high schooler and not so much after that, given my areas of study.

And it was an area that was deeply neglected for me, and I longed for it. I noticed that I really wanted to come back to it. And so I'm delighted that in some ways now I am moving towards that space and work as a writer. Love that. And was there a pivotal moment when you joined the Story Skills Workshop? Like, was there something that made you go, yes, this is it? Yes. And it is also a coincidence. You know, Rumi mentioned now or never. And it felt that way for me.

It was at a time during the pandemic, I was quite isolated and feeling lonely and down in a way that felt prolonged. And something occurred to me, something luckily just clicked in my need to reconnect to this creative practice. In fact, I'd never really thought about it as a practice prior to that. And I had received notification of this course, the Story Skills course, I had actually signed up for it, I think a year and a half prior.

And something happened, I think it was in August of 2022, perhaps. I just said, I need to do this now. And it so happened that I signed up. It's a good thing I said it then, because I ended up enrolling in the last of the story skills courses for some time. So I got lucky. And I got in right at the end and right at the beginning of when Story of the Republic was starting.

So really it was an internal yearning of sorts, a realization that there was something deep inside that had not been nourished for a long time that needed to be paid some attention. Wonderful. And what do you enjoy most about being part of the community? Oh gosh, everything. It's been a delight and a surprise, a surprise and a delight, I will say.

And that term just takes me back to my days at Ford Motor Company as an engineer, actually, because that's something that we talked about in creating things is wanting to surprise, aiming for surprise and delight. And really, that's what this community has been for me. So I came in thinking, okay, this is going to be a way that I can continue to engage in the practice of writing and storytelling.

And I'm really thrilled to say that I now consider some of the folks that I see here on the platform on a regular basis and, you know, three of you here on the call, certainly friends, dear friends. And it's a funny thing, because I used to think that dear friendships took a lot of time to nurture. And what I'm realizing now in my older age is that it's really not about time. It's about the quality of the interaction.

And I think that's part of what we see here on Story of the Public in this community. So beautiful. And it goes back to what Ruby said. It's the honesty. It's the honesty that comes through. It's the honesty from the side, I agree, from the side of the speaker or the storyteller. And it's the deep listening from the other side. So there is that relationship and requirement, I think, on both sides.

That's absolutely true. So Sabah, I would love you to firstly maybe share again when that prompt was given. What is love? What was your process? How did you land where you landed? Where did your head and heart go initially? Well, initially, I was a little bothered by the prompt, if I'm honest. And I was bothered because it felt so large. It felt really difficult to answer that question.

And so I went from feeling bothered to feeling challenged, to almost feeling like, okay, you know what, I'm not going to participate in this particular round of storytelling, because it just feels too big, too vast.

And I think it was tapping into that feeling of vastness that prompted the story that I did share in the initial live storytelling session that was tied to this prompt and often that's how I get to my stories it starts with a feeling I connect with a feeling and that story was, actually not the one that I ended up choosing for the book. There was something real-time that was happening at the time of the book that also felt more pressing, let's put it that way.

And so that's actually the story that I ended up writing for this book. It was, I think, transpiring as I wrote it. And that was a different kind of challenge, but it was a smaller story in a way than the one that I had originally told probably. Wow. Isn't that interesting? I love how honest you are about that, that you felt bothered by it at first.

It is such a big, as you say, vast subject, but what is so beautiful is that everybody managed to dive into little, personal moments of time, things captured from their life stories, and that vastness was replaced by diversity. I think you touch on something really important about storytelling that we learned here in the course that we took, and it's so true. Many people can feel intimidated by the call to tell a story, and the story doesn't have to be something phenomenal or really vast.

The story can be significant in the tiny moments. So, yes to what you're saying. Absolutely. What would you like to share from your story? Well, I can read a part of my story, if that's okay with you. Beautiful. A short bit. So this particular story is about a time that my daughter was experiencing a difficulty that felt new and deep and difficult. So I'll start and just read a little bit here. The two of us are in the car here, and I'm discovering and noticing what's going on for her.

Zara remains seated, her hollow cheeks glistening with lines of salt water. Below them, her hand rests over her heart. What's the matter, I ask. I feel heavy, she says, pressing on her chest. She is 17, healthy, and well-liked at school. Her chest should not feel heavy. Though her advocacy had manifested many hair-yanking moments, I assumed that her resilient nature would neutralize the blows. Now, I sense my error.

Losses, when accumulated, inevitably take their toll. A tangle of heat at the base of my throat begins to rise. It's okay, I say, tightening my grip on the steering wheel. Let's do some breathing. This time, she responds immediately with a nod. All right, together. In, two, three. Out, two, three four five her chest swells then collapses not the chest i say gently remember i watch as she stops then restarts after some adjustments she does remember.

For several minutes, we breathe, ballooning and deflating our bellies, intent on restoring our aching, ailing hearts. Like this, we settle into a slow, synchronous rhythm. I'm so tired, mama, she says, dropping tears again. A high-spirited, chatty teen with no words or will to speak, struggles to breathe with the protracted effort of an old woman. This is the impact of a system with no incentive to take ethical stands.

In the past, I might have felt outraged. Right now, though, I register only gratitude. A child's exhaustion, after all, is easier to remedy than their despair. Thank you. Thank you, Sabah. And I think that piece that you've chosen really sort of gives a sense of what your story is about. But the whole story is, wow, like has never been the times we're living through today, I think, really brings it to the reality that many people are feeling.

And I just feel that if more people could understand that human impact, then maybe, you know, maybe they'd open their hearts to love more than judgment, anger, and hatred. Agreed. Agreed. I hope, I wish that our listeners will read this book and will, I know with the listeners on this podcast, they are very open and heart-centered, but maybe also share with some other people too around because that sense of anger, frustration and judgment just seems to be building up.

So this is a remedy. This is a little small remedy to touch your heart and open it to positive human emotions. Thank you all of you for coming on this show, a special episode to celebrate the launch of What Is Love. I will include links in the show notes to all of you where people can get in touch with you if they would like.

And some of your work and I'd love to to close this by asking each of you to share what is your hope you know through the work you're doing through the stories you're sharing through what is love and beyond if you could realize your best dreams over the next five years you know thinking to 2030 and if your very best dreams could come to fruition what would they look like for that i'll start with you oh that's a big question again, you know i'm going to go to the smallest go into the smallest.

Well we just talked about what to do when it feels vast i'm going to bring it in really really small. I'm going to pick one thing, which is listening. I mentioned it earlier. Deep listening. Listening, not just with our ears, but with our hearts. Listening without judgment. Listening without agendas, as difficult as that may seem. It's part of the work that I do right now in terms of bringing people together to engage in ways to connect one-to-one with people.

And listening is one of those skills, practices, whatever you want to call it, that I think is so highly underrated and so critical to forging the path that you talked about. Thank you.

Thank you. Absolutely. Leanne? That is a big question. And I guess if you're asking me for one thing, there's many things, but it's just sort of what I've decided in terms of what I'm doing to share the book locally here in my little community, where we have a huge issue related to people experiencing homelessness and marginalization. And I think what we see in the story Republic and what we see in this book, you know, is the power of our shared stories and, And really,

all of our stories are shared stories. They're all stories that we can share. And they're all stories we can learn from if we, as Sabah said, listen, and if we hear each other, and if we see each other. And, you know, I just believe if we could, you know, humanity is going to be okay, despite the uncertain times we're living in. That idea that we see each other and that love comes into play and we're open to the love that comes into our heart.

When we might be sitting beside someone we never thought we would ever talk to and we would ever listen to and we would ever hear and that we can see in ourselves that beauty that we can love each other that way, and you know without judgment and unconditionally man again be a great place to live wouldn't it wow wouldn't it just beautiful thank you Leanne. Rumi? What's Rumi's dream? My dream is to enter a canon of authors whose stories make people not feel alone.

And alone in that space, Sabah, where you left off with your story, I suddenly realized that I, as a young person, was lucky that someone else's honest stories reached me just before exhaustion turned into despair. Like irreparable despair. Like it's suddenly dawning on me now that there was a little tiny, slim margin that I could have fallen into despair that would be very difficult to dig out of.

And because someone had the courage to tell their lib story vulnerably and honestly, and I could see a glimmer of hope in it, i i kept on being just exhausted not all the way in despair and it's i'm still there but differently and i you know when i think about the calling that now we're never feeling i had at 50 was am i going to enter do the brave work of paying that gift forward and that is what i said yes to so five years from now I hope that that the impact of

that decision will touch somebody in that space keep them from falling into despair from all of you thank you your hopes your aspirations your dreams are dreams that I share as well and and I would love our listeners to leave this with a question. What is love? What is love to you? If you were to write a story, it could be a short two-liner, it could be a long story, what story would you tell? And think about it. Play with it. You never know what might come from it. So thank you, Rumi, Sabah,

Leanne. And thank you so much for taking time to come and talk about this beautiful book and your experiences related to it. I think it's been a wonderful conversation and, yeah, I look forward to hearing what listeners think about it. Music.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the for love and money podcast if you'd like to take a deeper dive into the purpose movement visit us at thecauseeffect.com.au and remember doing good is good for business so if you're not doing good then what are you doing.