It’s been a week of unexpected love stories — and it’s still only Wednesday.

Three days ago, I joined a Q&A with three monastics from Plum Village — Brother Spirit, Sister True Dedication, and Sister Lang Nghiem — as part of Thich Nhat Hanh’s “Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet” programme. Listening to them answer participants’ questions, I felt as though I’d settled into an altered frequency of being. Everything looked and felt spacious — in their manner of listening, reflecting, answering, taking up space, or deferring space to a colleague.

Everything about their presence — the pauses between their words, the way they smiled before speaking, the warmth of their smiles while listening — transmitted calm, grounded joy, and a complete lack of self-importance. I fell in love with every one of them on the spot.

What struck me most was their simple, direct honesty. Their acceptance of what is — without an ounce of passivity. Simple, direct connection with life. They spoke of celibacy not as obligation or denial but as a form of expanded love: choosing not to be parents of a few, but of many. They talked about despair as energy that can be transformed into vow, and about the discipline of holding multiple truths without collapsing into polarisation or judgement.

Sister Lang Nghiem’s reflection on visiting her family has stayed with me. She described witnessing their everyday habits — drinking alcohol, eating meat, consuming plastic-wrapped goods, running too-busy lives — and realising that preaching never changes anyone. Transformation, she said, happens when people touch their own suffering deeply enough. Her task was to live her insight and wisdom with peace, joy and steadiness, and let the simplicity of that be her transmission.

No hint of ego or superiority, of course. I fell in love with her absence of judgement, her maturity in allowing others to be where they are, and the integrity of living her truth without making it anyone else’s. I fell in love with all of them — and specifically, with the state of being they embodied. It was the purest form of “being the change” I’ve ever witnessed, and it inspired me immensely.

Then, yesterday, came another encounter — this time with a woman named Michèle from Colorado. She appeared on my Zoom screen and, within minutes, I felt that same recognition. We spoke for over an hour and could have gone on all day.

Like me, Michèle has lived through a litany of losses — her son, her brother, both parents, and an ex-husband. And yet she radiates a kind of peace that has nothing to do with denial. She spoke of her son’s brain injury, his spiritual sensitivity, and the accident that ended his life. She told me about the psychics and mediums who helped her make sense of his death — not to escape pain, but to stay in conversation with him. She speaks openly of the spirit world, of signs and dreams, with a humility that’s rare in any belief system. And she spoke of the book she — and he — are writing together.

Despite our very different backgrounds — her Cajun Catholic roots and my British-European secular formation — we met in the same field: mothers who have buried children, women whose lives have been shaped and deepened by multiple losses, both committed to helping others live more fully, not despite but because of the pain.

We talked about grief, mysticism, and psychedelics — how these different doorways can crack us open to the vastness. We spoke about our work, each in our own way helping others touch the pain and lean into the mystery of life and death without so much fear. And underneath it all was the brilliant joy of recognition: There you are! I’ve been waiting so long to meet you!

I don’t use the phrase “soul sister.” It’s not my language, and I’m wary of borrowing from cultural traditions that aren’t my own. But if I were ever to use it, it would be for Michèle. There was that unmistakable feeling of meeting someone who has walked through the same fires and learned to tend the flames.

Later yesterday evening, I spoke with my friend and mentor, Kate Cowie. Our conversation circled around similar themes, though Kate’s capacious mind allowed her to name them more succinctly. She spoke about how I have something important and unique to bring to people — about staying in contact with life, and what happens when suffering and pain clear a space for deeper seeing. She spoke with determination and warmth, as if wanting to wake me up to something in myself that I’m only just beginning to grasp.

This morning, Kate followed up with an email — one she’d rooted out from more than six years ago. It was dated April 2019, a date that stopped me in my tracks: exactly two years after Mike had died, and two months before Julia was to take her life. At the time, I was living on constant alert, my entire system frayed by the effort of keeping her safe, shuttling between hospitals, horror and hope. No wonder her words passed me by. They read:

“Hello Emma – I continue to be both moved and humbled by your courage in such difficult times. At the risk of offering a ‘head’ response, I am reminded of Simone Weil’s thinking about affliction and self-sacrifice as a route to encountering the world: we stop putting our own readings on the world and momentarily, at least, we become lucid. She thought all of us, potentially, could suffer, but some of us, it seems to me, have to suffer more than others, and so, I have to hope, have the opportunity to make more ‘contact’ with the world.”
— Kate x

I have zero recollection of reading or receiving the email. Nothing in me is jogged as I revisit it now. I am enough of a heathen to need to go and look up the core of Simone Weil’s brilliance, even though I’ve heard of her. (I know much more about Simone Veil — another hero of mine.)

What moves me most, as I reflect on Kate’s rather out-of-the-blue call yesterday and her follow-up message this morning, is her sense of near-urgency that I recognise it too. She isn’t praising me, exactly — simply showing me what she sees: that I have a way of seeing and being that is hard-won, worth tending, and worth sharing.

The monastics, Michèle, and Kate’s rediscovered email have all highlighted the same wisdom — the need to show up to life as it is. When we can do that — with ourselves, another person, a situation, or the world itself — then we are truly present. And when we are in that field of presence, in contact and connection with what is, it’s akin to falling in love. It’s like being in love.

And perhaps that’s it: I am in love — with love, with life, with this ongoing dance of being here at all.