Genuine love is that which holds without holding on;
That which creates and lets go of its creation;
That which accepts without judgment and yet transforms.
In a recent New York Times essay, the novelist Celeste Ng writes that “Love is a slippery and intangible thing, and sometimes we can only pin it down in these mundane, bodily needs.” She is referring to everyday ordinary and extraordinary moments, food, texts, dozing off, and emails from friends and loved ones. But every day, mundane things are ALWAYS facing us, and thus the possibility of love is ALWAYS available to us. There is no slipperiness, intangibility, or rareness in this readily available bouquet. Love is and always has been the entirety of what we are, what we do, what we see, feel and think—EVERYTHING. What Celeste Ng and most of us don’t normally realize is that it is recognizing this love that is slippery, intangible, occasional, and temporary. This lack of awareness may be because of our inability to maintain constant openness and focus. Because if we could do so, we would recognize that we are never without it, that it surrounds us as much as the ocean surrounds the fish within it. Love is the ordinariness of life itself. It is the joyful lunch with friends, but also the lonely feeling when no one is around. It is both the happiness and the pain experienced. Love is life itself—we just need to recognize it.
What prevents us from recognizing it? Our spinning, monkey mind — the aspect that cannot settle down and which engages each and every thought it creates, distracting us from what is real. Paradoxically, love is always communicating to us, “I am here.” But our mind storm drowns out its voice and obscures recognition of its reality. STOP the spinning mind and realize that love is there—it has always been there in all its wonder. For love is not a slippery and intangible thing—it is the essence of all that is.
