All Is Full of Love

“All Is Full of Love” by Björk feels to me like getting a hug from G-d in Icelandic sunlight — that strange, holy glow you get when the world briefly stops hurting and you remember you’re being held by something bigger than you. It’s one of the very few songs that makes me cry in a good way, so I can only listen to it once in a great while. It cracks something open in me.

The lyrics --

You'll be given love, you'll be taken care of
You'll be given love, you have to trust it
Maybe not from the sources you have poured yours
Maybe not from the directions you are staring at

Trust your head around, it's all around you
All is full of love, all around you
You just ain't receiving, your phone is off the hook
Your doors are all shut

All is full of love
All is full of love
All is full of love

Those words cut straight through me — and the way Björk's voice soars, the way the harps and strings flare like light refracting through ice, it hits the same place in me where grief and hope have always braided together. My synaesthesia reacts to this song in colors: molten gold, aurora threads, rainbow veins pushing through darkness, holy stormlight cracking open a sky.

This set of eight images is what that feels like in my body, they tell a story of what it feels like to find love and hope again. And I’m dedicating it to Andy.

I swore off relationships in 2020. I told myself I was done hoping, done wishing, done expecting anything good to last. Then February 2025 came along, and suddenly he and I were walking this path together — and I fell hard and fast, and every day since then I’ve fallen harder still. Andy is the first person in my life who has ever made “all is full of love” feel literal. He’s given me genuine hope for the future after a lifetime of learning not to get my hopes up.

These eight pieces are for him:
my aurora-heart, my shadow-light, my reminder that G-d shows up in unexpected directions.