Hi everyone,
As you read this, I’m back in Liverpool, on a trip that’s a combination of research and much-needed inspiration.
To mark the occasion, I thought I’d share with you a portion of an email exchange I recently had with a young listener of Beautiful Possibility, who wrote to me about their excitement at going to see Paul McCartney in concert for the first time.
In their email (recounted with their permission), this young listener shared that they live in an extremely remote area, and that getting to the concert required an all-day plane trip. They told me they’d made two hundred friendship bracelets to pass out at the concert, and that they were worried about having been foolish — that there couldn’t possibly be that many people who’d want one of those bracelets.
Here is my reply.
Dear LH,
As I write this, you’re days away from your flight to Minneapolis and to Paul. I’m so excited for you. I’m so excited for Paul, to have you there. I’m so excited for the world, that you are flying so many thousands of miles to see him.
There was a night in the middle of midwifing Part One of Beautiful Possibility into the world when I wasn’t at all sure any of this was going to work. I, too, felt foolish — I wondered whether anyone was even paying attention. I wondered if I’d been blinded by love into believing that any of this mattered outside of my own delusional heart.
That night, I dreamed of a web of love for The Beatles wrapping itself around the world, and of lights blinking on, just here and there, across that web. Some of those lights were brighter, some a bit less bright, all of them like stars appearing in a twilight sky, or perhaps like lights in the windows of far-flung houses in the vast wilderness of Maine. In my dream, I understood — in that way one does in dreams — that I was seeing people connecting with Beautiful Possibility, making that web of love a bit brighter than it had been before.
I think of this web of light and love, when I think of you and your bracelets, flying through the night on the way to see Paul.
I write Beautiful Possibility with the whole of my talent and my heart, but you, LH — you are the future, because you are one of the newest, brightest lights in the web, lighting up with the love you have for Paul and for John, and for the love they share and the music that came out of that love.
Your light, combined with many more, will show us the way forward, into the full realisation of the better world their love gifted us with. I can’t tell you how much hope it gives me, that you will fly thousands of miles to witness Paul sing his songs. It makes me believe that we really can heal this story and our broken world.
I will think of you and your bracelets when I’m in Liverpool, LH. In the liminal space of Penny Lane, and the bright community of Strawberry Fields, and swept up in the ecstatic madness of the Cavern. I’ll think of you and your bracelets as I walk along Menlove Avenue, through the white feathers that drift down like furry snowflakes from the trees where the doves make their nests. And I will think of you and your bracelets as I visit those special places you asked me about — because, yes, there are a few.
One of those special places is a scruffy coffee house in the heart of Woolton Village, just down the hill from St. Peter’s Church.
At this coffee house, I will sit at the single table outside that always seems to be waiting for me. I’ll have a tea and watch the bus stop across the road, which — in the early afternoon when I always seem to find myself there — is crowded with grammar school kids in their school uniforms.
I’ll watch the boys in their navy blue jackets with the school patches, their ties loosened and book bags slung over their shoulders, and I’ll think about John and Paul in their school uniforms — maybe at this same bus stop — all those years ago. I’ll think about how young they were, and how in love, and what they would go on to do because of that love, and what they would sacrifice in the doing of it, to give us the freedom to be who we choose to be in a way no generation had ever been given before.
On one of those past occasions, I rode back to the city centre on a bus filled with those schoolboys. From my seat, I watched as a tough-looking boy with a black jacket over his uniform stood behind a beautiful dark haired boy. And I watched as the boy in the black jacket put his hands on the shoulders of the beautiful dark haired boy. And I watched as he ran his thumb softly over the dark haired boy’s neck, beneath the collar of his school uniform, and the way the dark haired boy leaned into the touch, and the way they stayed like that, amidst their friends on a crowded bus — not saying a word to one another, just quietly touching.
LH, it took all the willpower I had, to keep it together.
There are other special places that call to me when I’m in Liverpool. The sacred silence of St. Peter’s Church Hall. A wild, forgotten corner of Strawberry Fields. The Pier Head, where people of all ages and nationalities photograph themselves at the Fab Four statues, while street performers play Beatles songs with varying degrees of skill. The walk along the River Mersey that connects Liverpool to the world.
But that moment on the bus and others like it —those are my most special places, gifted to me — like the web of lights in my dream — when I least expect them, to light up that web in still another way.
I’m writing this during a dark time, LH, and you’re reading it during a dark time. But as dark as it is now, the world was darker still when The Beatles first came into it — all four of them born in the blood and fury of World War II, when the entire globe was engulfed in a deathforce of previously unfathomable magnitude.
Another dark time is upon us, and it remains to be seen how much of the globe it will engulf before it passes. But whatever happens, never doubt the power of this story — and of the music born from it. Both are far more powerful than anything that’s unfolding now, because the story and the music are rooted in the lifeforce power of love. And as The Beatles themselves showed us, the power of that love to re-arrange worlds is way beyond compare.
Never doubt, LH, that love can change the world. It’s the only thing that ever truly has.
So fly away to witness Paul’s music and his love for John. Push away the dark and your fears and your worries, and instead, for this night, give yourself to the ecstasy of the moment. I wish you so much joy, and I also wish you the tears that will come, because — as we know from fairy tales — tears have a magick all their own, when they’re shed for love.
And as for those two hundred bracelets, give them away, all of them, to everyone, young and old — because they, too, are filled with the power of love, and they will help to help the world in ways you will likely never fully know.
Thank you for your light.
Peace, love, and strawberry fields,
Faith 💖
CODA
I’m not at liberty to share their entire post-concert reply, but I suspect y’all will want to know how things went with the bracelets—
We got to the stadium early, and despite your encouragement, I waffled on handing out bracelets. It took until the opening slideshow started on the big screens that I forced myself out of my seat. Talking to strangers is hard! But out of the two hundred I made, I gave away all but 20 or so. Most folks, once they understood what I was offering, were thrilled to get a bracelet. People actually stood up and crossed over sections in order to ask for a bracelet for themselves, their kid, their partner. It was a lot of fun, once I got over the initial (Everest-sized) mountain of nerves. Another instance of Beatles magic: more than once, more than 4-5 times actually, a person would reach into my giant ziplock of bracelets and pull out one that just happened to spell out their favorite song.
Beatle magick indeed.
