Embrace

It begins with a goodbye that isn't really a goodbye—my son's arms around my waist, his head tucked just below my heart, and the words slip out: "you have the sweetest embrace." Then my daughter's voice, curious: "mama, what is embrace?"

What is embrace.

I carry this question in my car, turning it over and over as I drive away. How do you explain to a child that an embrace is both the arms that hold and the holding itself? That it's the space between two bodies becoming one space, the moment when separateness dissolves into connection?

We say: embrace change. As if change were a body we could wrap our arms around, as if we could contain its wild edges within the circle of our acceptance. We say: embrace the moment, embrace the journey, embrace the unknown. All these intangible things we try to hold, to make ours through the act of accepting them.

But what happens when we embrace? Does the embracer become the embraced? When I hold my children, am I containing their wildness or letting it run through me like electricity? When we embrace change, does it reshape us from the inside out, or do we reshape it by making it familiar?

I think about how we learn to embrace. How a newborn's fingers curl around our own—instinct before intention. How toddlers hug with their whole bodies, all in, no reservation. How teenagers begin to hesitate, to calculate the cost of connection. How adults can stand at the edge of embrace like swimmers at the shore of a cold lake, knowing the shock of intimacy that awaits.

An embrace can be a harbor or a cage. It can feel like coming home or being trapped. Sometimes it's both at once—like when we embrace a truth we've been running from, and it hurts, but it's a hurt that heals. Or when we embrace a loss, holding it close not because we want to, but because that's how we learn to carry it.

My son's embrace is sweet because it's pure intention. There's no calculation in it, no weighing of what's given against what's received. He embraces the way rain embraces the earth—completely, without question or condition. The way morning embraces the world—gradually, then all at once, filling every empty space with light.

Perhaps this is what embrace means: to create a circle of acceptance wide enough to hold whatever comes. To say yes not just with our words but with our whole being. To make space inside ourselves for something or someone else to dwell.

Or maybe it's simpler than that. Maybe an embrace is just love made visible, tangible, embodied. The moment when distance surrenders to closeness, when two separate stories become, briefly, one story.

My daughter's question follows me home: "mama, what is embrace?" And I think: it's this. This curiosity. This reaching out to understand. This holding of a question until it becomes an answer. This way we have of gathering the world into our arms, one word, one moment, one person at a time, until we find ourselves gathered too.