There are songs that feel less like something you listen to and more like somewhere you enter.
Minnie Riperton’s “Les Fleurs” is one of them.
The song opens her 1970 debut album, Come to My Garden, and unfolds exactly as its subject does. It begins delicately, almost privately, before expanding into something lush, orchestral, and impossible to contain. Critics have often read the flower at its center as a metaphor for realizing one’s potential, renewal, and the courage to bloom fully into oneself.
It feels fitting for the beginning of The Love Commandment.
Not because TLC began fully formed. Quite the opposite.
It began as an idea that needed tending.
A belief that perhaps we have become too accustomed to immediacy. That communication has gotten faster while intimacy has not necessarily become deeper. That there is still something sacred about sitting with what you feel long enough to find the words for it.
The mission of The Love Commandment has always been to restore depth, intentionality, and reverence to human connection through the art of writing. TLC was conceived in response to instant gratification and emotionally detached communication, with a desire to make room again for physical correspondence, storytelling, beauty, and community.
In that way, Les Fleurs feels almost like a soundtrack for the house in its infancy.
A flower does not bloom because someone tells it to hurry.
It takes its time.
It turns toward light.
It becomes.
And there is something deeply romantic about becoming.
Not romance only in the sense of lovers, but the larger romanticism TLC believes in: believing that a friendship deserves a letter. That a mother’s handwriting is worth keeping. That love for oneself can be made ceremonial. That devotion to God can be written privately on a page. That care for another person can still require effort.
TLC was built around the belief that love must be practiced intentionally and that writing gives form to things that might otherwise remain unspoken.
Les Fleurs is about blooming. TLC is about tending.
Perhaps those are not very different things.
Then there is October.
October is the tenth month of the year, though its name still carries a trace of an earlier life. It comes from the Latin octo, meaning eight, because it was originally the eighth month of the old Roman calendar before January and February shifted its position. Time and Date
I love that about October.
Even the month carries a memory of what it used to be.
There is something very TLC about that.
The past does not disappear simply because we arrive somewhere new. We bring old names, old handwriting, old photographs, old loves, old versions of ourselves with us.
And now October sits at ten.
Within Christian symbolism, ten has often been associated with ideas of completeness, order, and responsibility. The most recognizable example is the Ten Commandments, the laws governing relationship with God and relationship with one another. Scripture returns to ten in other places too, from the tenth given in tithing to groups of ten used throughout biblical narratives and parables. The Bible does not provide a dictionary declaring one universal mystical meaning for every number, but Christian interpreters have long noticed the pattern of ten appearing around ideas of order, fullness, and responsibility.
That feels especially meaningful for a house called The Love Commandment.
Our name already returns to a commandment: to love God, and to love others as ourselves.
And so beginning this chapter in the tenth month feels less like something to turn into superstition and more like something beautiful to notice.
Ten as responsibility. Ten as order. Ten as completeness.
Not because TLC is complete now, but because a beginning can contain the shape of what it hopes to become.
October feels like the first full turn of the key.
The envelopes exist. The paper can be touched. Pearls, lace, rhinestones, wax, handwriting, photographs and ideas that once existed only in notes and mood boards are becoming physical things.
The garden is no longer imaginary.
Something has begun to bloom.
And maybe that is why Les Fleurs feels so right for this moment. The song does not sound timid about beauty. By the time it reaches its grandest moments, it is abundant. Almost excessive. Strings, voices, horns, color, movement. Its softness never requires it to make itself small.
That is a language TLC understands.
Femininity without apology.
Romance without embarrassment.
Beauty without explaining why it is useful.
Love without pretending not to care.
The Love Commandment is still at its beginning. There is so much of the house that has not been made yet, so much we have not written, photographed, collected, given, or discovered.
For now, October asks only that we begin.
Plant something.
Tend to it.
Write the letter.
Say the thing.
Let it bloom.