Love Is What We Are

Last week I wrote about liking someone — that quiet, daily choice to stay kind, to stay patient, to stay present.

This week, with Valentine’s Day around us, I wrote lyrics to a song and put them to music. It came from wondering about love — not the restless wanting we often mistake for it, but the steady presence that asks us to see one another clearly and gently.

For this Valentine’s Day, when we speak of love, may it help us observe it as it should be — simple, constant, and larger than ourselves. The song will I say the rest.

Happy Valentine's Day

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Love is one of those words we use so often it begins to lose its flavor. We say we love coffee, love music, love a person, love the sunset. But love—true love—isn’t a sentiment or a preference. It’s not something we do, really. It’s what we are.

You see, love isn’t about holding or keeping. It’s not about possessing, and it’s certainly not about needing. Love is spacious. It’s the great Yes that underlies all things. It is the quiet recognition: I see you, and in seeing you, I remember myself.

And here’s the beautiful twist: the moment you truly love another, you stop seeing them as separate. The boundary dissolves. What you thought was “you” and “them” becomes something shared, like two candles lit from the same flame. That flame? That’s what people call God. Not the old man in the sky, not some far-off judge. No—God, if the word means anything at all, is this pulsing, radiant aliveness in all things. And love is its light.

So when you love someone, you’re not reaching out—you’re reaching in, into the very heart of being. Love is how the universe remembers itself. How it looks through your eyes, into someone else’s, and says: Ah, there you are.

That’s why love can hurt. Because it asks us to be vulnerable, to dissolve the armor we’ve built to protect our little “self.” But love is not interested in your protection. It wants your truth. Your trembling. Your whole, flawed, beautiful being.

And the miracle is: when you offer yourself in love, without condition or demand, you are returned to wholeness. Not because the other person completes you, but because love reveals that you were never separate in the first place.

Humanity’s greatest suffering has never come from lack of knowledge or resources. It comes from forgetting this simple truth: we belong to each other. Not as property, but as extensions of the same breath, the same dream, the same unspeakable mystery that brought stars into being.

So love, not because it’s noble or romantic. Love because it’s real. Because when all the stories fall away, when the mind grows still and the body fades, it is love—only love—that remains.

And it doesn’t need a reason.