One of my many favorite Rumi quotes says: “Your task is not to seek for love. But merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.”
My hypervigilant mind has been so accustomed to the notion that love is scarce. It has searched endlessly for all the places in this world, and in myself, where it has gone missing. But over time I’ve come to the realization that love is quite the opposite: always here, always available. That void–the sense that love is lacking–has been an illusion. A cloak of familiarity and predictability, crafted from all of my running, ignoring, mistrusting, and denying everlasting, ever present Love.
Love is, by definition: affection, compassion, care for another. It shows up in a pair of eyes that meet mine, in the sun on my face, in the sound of my name in children’s voices. I feel it when Roscoe greets me each day, in the swell that fills my chest every time I look at him, and kiss him on his sweet head. I am fed love In every meal Walt prepares, in moments of laughter and teasing with my kids. In the lightness of my sister’s voice when we talk daily. In the feel of my mom’s hand when all I can do is just hold that and say “I love you.”
And then there’s the simplest love of all. The kind that surfaces in quiet stillness. A love that finds its way, winding through my cells. Like the faintest whisper, in my inhaling and exhaling–a string being plucked in the center of my heart. When mind is quiet, and soul can finally awaken to my connectedness (affection, compassion, care) for every living thing.
Love truly is like a river: it never stops flowing and finding its way to me every time I open to it. Flowing out into the world when I don’t get in the way. I can’t conjure it, or plan it, or control it. It’s not something I need to strive for, or search for, earn or even “deserve.” Like infinite, omnipresent beauty- it just is. In me, around me. Everywhere.