Love Note #14: What Is Love?
Love—what is it really, beyond all our ideas and expectations about what it should be? Beyond the heart emojis and Valentine's cards, beyond spiritual concepts and cultural conditioning, beyond even our deepest longings for connection—what is this force that moves through all of existence?
The mind takes spiritual truths and tries to apply them in its own poverty-stricken way, especially around love. We hear that "love is an inside job" and turn toward ourselves only to find Old Mother Hubbard's cupboard—looking, looking, looking for the juice. We can read spiritual books and go to meetings and think that love is somewhere to get, something to acquire. But love isn't a destination or an object. In fact, it's the one thing that absolutely confounds the grabby "me" because it cannot be grabbed!
What we think of as love is often wrapped in layers of cultural conditioning—ideas about romantic love, familial duty, spiritual attainment. But the elemental nature of love is far simpler and more profound. It's the ground of being itself, the space that holds all of existence. Love is what remains when all our strategies for feeling good, all our coping mechanisms, all our ideas about what love should look like fall away.
While we're busy grabbing and trying, love, peace, and freedom rest below all that as our deepest self. No one is left out—there's no one whose deepest self is not that. Love winks at us through beauty—not shallow beauty, but the beauty that shimmers when someone speaks authentically from the heart, when we behold the natural world, when we witness a selfless act. It touches, moves and opens our hearts through our grandchildren, our pets, and through music, poetry and great art.
Your deepest nature isn't distant or buried in some deep cavern—it's singing to you all the time, from inside and outside, since the Holy lives everywhere. It's calling to you as much as you call to it—in fact, much more, because while we forget and stop calling, the Holy continues on, through birdsong, ocean expanse, starlit skies, and the feel of the very ground beneath our feet. It never forgets itself.
Throughout spiritual traditions, there are many flavors of calling to love—prayer, practice, praise, the call and response in kirtan. We beg for love’s response like babies call to their mamas. But love even answers us in her emptiness, allowing us to experience and know and plumb the depths of our own call. Out of the depth of your heart comes the call, and out of the depth of your own heart comes the love.
When the heart has been emptied of all other concerns, the fire and light of love take up residence there. It has a radiance, a glow, a warm shine. Love lives in your noticing gaze below your opinions and judgments. The presence that looks out of your eyes is love itself. The space that holds all of this is in love with all of this, and all of this is in love with the space that is hosting it, way below all of our wars with it.
You are the guest house. This spacious now is a guest house, lovingly hosting everything that dances in it. Intrinsic to your pure and simple noticing is this blessing. Blessing is nothing more than noticing or speaking what is as it is, without a war with it. This is what awaits as we turn toward what is given in each moment—an opportunity to sit as love’s eyes, allowing, meeting beholding.
Love is not "out there" somewhere—it's the very fabric of existence, the space in which all experience arises. When we drop our seeking and our strategies, when we release our grip on how we think things should be, we discover that love has been here all along, looking out through our eyes, beating in our hearts, present in every breath.
Dedicated to love’s unfolding in you,
Jeannie
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