and I love you

“Now that I forgive the world for the love of you,” says a prisoner wrongly condemned fourteen years in a dungeon, to the prisoner in the neighboring cell. What power to unlock the heart beyond time and space! From my perspective, it is as though the doors are spring loaded with a hair trigger. The stranger in the café looks at me with long recognition, knowing we have not met, knowing we are connected in truth, separated by decades. We love as simply as we awaken, as a first impulse. Love does not depend on the response, certainly not the outer response. We do our part, open the doors, and that is everything. First there is interest, then empathy, and love flowers. The existence of love, the fact that we breathe, move, live wholly within it, does not make it recognized by all. Does air exist when we are drowning? What matter; it is an intellectual affair. It does us no good as we sink. Love can be showered upon us, but unless we love, unless the shower flows through us, it does not exist. Finding love, looking for love, these are song lyrics. Simply love! Start small if you like: love your rock, love your house plant, love your cat, your dog. Care. Of course and naturally, someone else who loves will be there, working, loving beside you, obviously, since your love helps them to love more, do more, be more. As we love, we pour what flows through the universe through our open hearts. It sometimes may be that we must love ourselves before we can fully love others; other times it is the opposite. What matters is to begin, and to know you will not be done learning about love until it is immediate, sudden, daily, moment to moment, and with everything in the world.

(*and I love you)