“My Love Mine All Mine” from Mitski’s latest album, ‘The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We,’ is a song that finds comfort, strength, and beauty in one’s capacity for love. There is power and agency that comes with recognizing that your love is yours. It is not something people can take from you or claim ownership of.
Our physical presence on Earth is temporary. In the first verse, Mitski asks the moon to share her love with the world once she’s no longer here to do it herself:
Moon, tell me if I could
Send up my heart to you?
So, when I die, which I must do
Could it shine down here with you?
My love is in the moon. Part of the ocean is stored within me, and I know this because I often walk at night––eyes searching for its comforting presence––with my head tilted up, seeking reassurance. When I see it, I am warmed and find myself returning.
My love is in the tender peeling of an orange. In cutting an apple in half and offering the other to someone I love. My love is in two cups of tea––letting the leaves soak, filling it with honey and lemon. In watching the sun. My love is in my underlines and annotations. In the release of my thoughts. My love is in the way I consume and absorb the world––its music, art, books, films. In the way that I share that with others.
The song makes me think about the poem “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver, particularly the first five lines:
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
You are not a subservient creature in a constant state of begging, waiting for forgiveness and approval. You don’t have to prove yourself worthy. There is an endless reservoir of love inside of you, and you don’t need someone else’s permission to access and find comfort in it.
I do not plead. I lay my body on the earth, align my spine to the ridges and furrows of a tree, and feel––the rush of water, the rustling of leaves as another animal searches for food, the fluttering of a bird’s feathers, the blades of grass swaying along with the hair growing on my body. I am present. I exist, and that is enough to make me worthy of being. The water is rippled and softly hammered under the moonlight. It is fluid, soft and malleable, and so am I.
I am a creature full of so much love. I will not give people the power to make me feel silly or shame for loving what I love and in the way that I do. My love is something that I embrace and allow to fill the spaces around me, spilling over and creating puddles on the pavement that we could jump and see reflections in. Reflections of the little girl that found hearts in everything––a leaf, cracks in the pavement, a flower, a cloud. Reflections of the little girl that believed her voice could summon the sun. That if she closed her eyes and sang a sweet song, the clouds would listen.