Love is the ultimate surrender.
We all seek to love and be loved. It is the deepest need and and at the same time the deepest desire we have. This essential truth cries out to us from every aspect of our lives, from the way we relate to our children and our parents, to our relation with our neighbours and friends, to the interactions with colleagues. In all of these relations, the shape and power of love are making themselves felt. To say that ‘love is everything’ is not understating this experience we have at every instant of our day, every moment we think a thought, every we breath we take, everything we do.
What does it mean to say that ‘love is everything’?
Is it saying that the entirety of the world is filled with love? Or perhaps that the laws of nature are ultimately governed by love? Or again that the energy that drives the processes of the world, that make our hearts beat, that turns the clouds to rain, that transform the food I eat in the morning into the song I hum in the afternoon, that changes consciousness into thought, thought into creative imagination, and intention into action? Yes. Love is what transforms the experiences of two individual souls into something far greater than the sum of their acts.
This common substance of all things that exist is neither hydrogen nor DNA. It is love.
Love is a relation. It is never singular. It never stands alone. It cannot be condensed to a single point, a single entity, a single substance. Love exists in between. It is a kind of primordial between-ness. It is the relation between living beings, two at a minimum, most often many more, multiplied and diffused, loves of loves. Love exists between living beings, and yet it is not a naked string attaching two objects. The relation itself between these two things has substance and meaning.
The connection between any two living beings is never an infinitesimal thread. The connection between two lives itself has a special kind of existence, a special kind of life, an interest and vitality, an emotion, a spirit of its own, even without being itself a living being.
The relation between two living beings is never indifferent. If there is any relation at all, even the most minute awareness of another, of the existence of someone else, then this awareness cannot avoid being filled with the substance of human concern, cannot help but be animated by some form of life, som kind of living energy.
A stranger steps in front of me on the subway. The person has form, shape, size, colour, odour, a kind of style, a way of looking, a way of moving through the world. All of these things transcend the naked facts about the person. Everything my senses detect about the person, shape, colour, fragrance, texture are linked immediately to who I am to my sense of beauty, to my ability to understand adn to judge, to my morality, to my capacity for hope, to my tendency toward fear. All of these components that make up the deepest levels and layers of who I am are activated by my meeting with the unknown person, all these small sparks of my own inner life, of my soul, every part of me is implicated in, awakened and animated by my awareness of the person. All these components of my experience of the other, these are what make up love, irrepressible, irreducible, unstoppable.
This core mystery at the heart of all things transcends us while at the same time resting quietly within us. This is the continuous reminder that our existence is not impersonal, not a web of threads tying individual hearts and minds together. Rather our lives are inhabited, lifted, animated by mysterious love.