The Hollow Flute (How to Be Loved)

I spent years manufacturing what was already there.

September 3, 2026

There's a song by Judah & the Lion called "How to Be Loved." It's a list of things a man wants. He'd like to love what he has more than what he wants, he says, and then he spends the whole song wanting. A Grammy. Money that talks so he doesn't have to. A house on the beach his friends can borrow. He'd like you to think he's a genius, and he'd like you to mean it.

You know this man. I was him for most of my life.

Near the end the wanting turns good. He wants to be a better uncle, a better husband, to walk the dogs more, to stop a stranger on the street and say they get another try. Those are the right things to want. I've wanted them most of my adult life, and if you told me they were the whole assignment I'd take the deal and feel I'd gotten off easy.

But the chorus doesn't change. It runs under the beach house and it runs under the dogs, the same words at the same volume, and it's in two halves. The first half is more. The second half turns around and asks what any of it was for, and answers itself: the money and the fame were a fight for attention, and the fight was for one thing, which is to feel like he's enough. Then it names it. Still learning how to be loved.

That's the whole song, and it's the title. Every want on the list was the same want in a different coat. The last time through, the fighting has become begging, feel enough has become know it, and the begging has a You on the other end. It's God.

The song ends on still learning. Not learned. Which is honest.

I know that last verse from the inside. Not the plaques. The trying.

Trying to be a good listener. Watching the face, waiting out the pause, keeping the next question loaded so there'd never be a silence anyone could fall into. Trying to remember to ask people about their day. Trying to make people feel important, which is a strange thing to be doing on purpose, and I was doing it on purpose.

All of it came out of me. I was the supply. Every kind thing I did was drawn off a tank I had to fill myself, and I never worked out where the filling was supposed to come from, because I didn't feel loved on the inside. So I ran the pump.

You can run a pump for years and nobody notices, because there's nothing to notice. What happens instead is that it runs low, and you start to ration. You develop opinions about which people are worth the full treatment. You can tell within a minute. Do they give any of it back. When they talk about their life, is there any grace in it. Is their story a list of the people who wronged them and the obstacles they overcame, or a list of things they learned the hard way. I was grading people on generosity. Nobody knew, and it was exhausting in a way that doesn't have a name. From the outside I looked like a decent man who was tired. From the inside, most days, I looked like that too.

The last hard run of it was this year, when I got to New York. I went around meeting everyone I knew here — old friends, acquaintances — because I wanted a friend group and this seemed like how you get one. I expressed interest. I expressed a great deal of interest. Every one of those meetings turned up empty. I couldn't pry my way into their lives. They have their lives, and no amount of expressed interest could land me a seat.

Love as a limited resource. That's what it was. I could feel it being one.

Fifteen years before that, I followed a friend into a room in Santa Monica.

I'd met him at a meditation retreat in Twentynine Palms, where we washed dishes and chopped vegetables for the people sitting the silence. He'd been an actor, and now he moved between meditation centers and ashrams. He was funny, and kind, and calm, and sure of himself in a way that didn't boast, and none of it looked like work. I'd have followed him anywhere. Where he went was a yoga studio where people sang.

The same short verses, over and over, in a language I didn't have a word of, on instruments I couldn't have named. If you'd stopped me at the door and asked what was being said, I couldn't have given you the subject.

And every person in there was serene. I wanted to be in their energy. That's the only reason I came back, and I'd have told you so in exactly those words.

A few weeks in, singing along to syllables I still didn't understand, something moved in me. I had no name for it. It felt healing, in a way I hadn't asked for and couldn't account for, and I kept going back.

I was not the one making that love.

I couldn't have been. There was nobody in that room to impress, no face to read, no next question to keep loaded. Every technique I had was useless in there, and it came anyway.

I was in love and I could not explain why.

A bansuri is a length of bamboo with the middle taken out. Cut, dried, hollowed, bored with holes, which are absences. It has no music in it. Everything it does with a song is done to breath that came from somewhere else, and the somewhere else is a person standing there with their mouth on it.

Krishna is nearly always shown holding one.1

What changed for me isn't that I got better at loving people. Nothing about me got stronger. I didn't pick up a technique. I stopped being the source. All that trying had been me blowing into my own flute.

And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.2

Shed abroad. Not produced there. Poured in and let out, and the verb doesn't belong to the heart it's happening in.

We love [Them], because [They] first loved us.3

That's the whole order of operations. Loved first. Loving second, and second because of first. Not loving in order to be loved, which is what I was doing, and not loving out of a private reserve, which is what I thought the good people had.

I still ask people about their day. From the outside it probably looks identical.

I'm just not where it starts anymore.

You might be wondering whether I'm still anybody, if I'm only the flute. I am. A flute is a particular flute — a length and a bore, it colors what goes through it, you could tell one from another with your eyes shut. And the song goes to somebody, a person who isn't me, and I'd better keep telling us apart or there's nobody there to love. I've written about that in The Distance That Love Needs. The breath goes through the flute. The flute's still standing there, and so is the person listening.

The song's last verse wants to stop a stranger and hand them another chance. That's a good thing to want, and it's still a transaction. You reach into yourself, find something, give it away, and have to go find more before the next stranger. That was my method for years. It wore me down because it was never going to be anything else.

That changed this summer, when Jesus found me. I've written that down in The Way Home Is Down. This is the same turn, from the inside.

The love doesn't come from the stranger now. It doesn't come from the friend, or the room, or the person across the table, and it isn't drawn out of me either. It comes in the quiet — music, stillness, contemplation, the Upanishads, the scriptures, teachers who were a long time dead before I found them. None of it requires another human being to be present. The first entry on that list was a room in Santa Monica where I didn't know a word of what I was singing.

The tradition I was singing in had put the order down two thousand years before I got to that room. The Gita's chapter on devotion — the text calls it the book of the religion of faith — describes the one who has given himself to God, and what it describes is a man who hateth nought / Of all which lives, living himself benign, / Compassionate. The kindness isn't the entrance. It's what comes out the far side of being loved.

Loved first. Then out.

Then I go outside, already loved.

Where I found people in New York was nowhere I'd been prying. A men's group. ACA meetings. A Bible study in Queens. A room of founders who take over a hotel lobby once a week and work. I showed up every week and was present for whatever was unfolding. Nobody needed prying.

I don't try anymore. I see God looking out at me from every set of eyeballs, and I love Them.

That isn't me collecting something. It's the overflow. I'm not searching a stranger's face for whether there's any love in it for me. I show up carrying it, and what I keep finding when I look is God, looking back, out of a face I've never seen before.

John puts both halves in one sentence: he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?4 Not a test. An anatomy. The seen brother and the unseen God were never two assignments.

And the love was there the whole time. It had been there for years while I stood at the pump. The whole of the change was me letting it be true.

The song ends on still learning, and so do I. But it isn't a skill and nobody gets good at it. You don't learn how to be loved. You are loved. I was enough before I started asking.

Footnotes

  1. Krishna is conventionally depicted with a bamboo flute; that much is standard iconography. The reading I take from it here — the hollowing as the qualification, the breath as somebody else's — is my own, and I offer it as an image rather than as a doctrine of any tradition. ↩

  2. Romans 5:5, KJV. ↩

  3. 1 John 4:19, KJV, which reads We love him, because he first loved us. Throughout this publication God takes They/Them; where a house pronoun replaces the pronoun in a quotation, the substitution is bracketed rather than made silently. ↩

  4. 1 John 4:20, KJV. ↩

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