How You Know
How do you know there’s love?
I’ll tell you how you know there’s love.
Love is there when turning to each other you turn into each other too.
Think about loving your dog or cat: the frolicking mew or ruff on the ground in a
welter of beast and you; the lift and the purr or the pant blobbing up to your
shoulder; your ear, lapped and drenched with loving goop, if not devoured.
Think of your favorite peanut butter stuck to the ceiling of your mouth so that when
you were asked a question suddenly your voice was the voice of peanut butter
itself: the viscous, delicious, inscrutable ooze you love even to this day.
And think of your love, not of creatures or things, but of doing: hiking, climbing,
jogging, swimming, biking, playing. You become not the trail or the hill or the
road or the pool or the pond or the sea or the game, but hiking, climbing,
jogging, swimming, biking, playing itself. So that in France, you jumped in the
Mediterranean, scaled three alps, and pedaled from château to château to
château. Well, I did, anyway. Substitute what you love to do, you’ll know when
there’s love.
And now that you’ve gotten this far, that we’ve gotten this far together, and you’ve
digested the above—and why else would you have kept on to here?—then I am
where you are, which is here. And part of me, this part of me
is rolling in your mind, and is part of you; the turn to each other has turned us into
ourselves; outward is inward; two are miraculously one.
And there is love.