My last blog ended with a slightly enigmatic statement: “It is the question that inspires Family Planting.”

Which question is it?

This one: “If we are relational, bodily selves, responsible for creating and becoming our highest ideals, then how do we learn to love?”

The question, for me, is not abstract. It is one that I live daily. It is one that I was living, exploring, and pursuing intensely as I wrote Family Planting.

Across the board, it is safe to say that love is among the highest human ideals. As we grow from infants-in-arms to adults standing on our own two feet, we come to an understanding of what love is. We have an experience of it. We have an idea of it. We aspire to learn how to make more of it. But where do those experiences and ideas come from? How do we make them real?

After the move our family made to the farm in 2005, I was finding that my usual patterns of relating with my partner, our children, and my parents were no longer feeling good to me. I was losing my sense of what love was and how to do it. I wanted more.

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