A few weeks ago, I got the message to just do good things. Simple enough. Powerful though, as an idea as a practice. Yesterday, the message I heard was to pray without ceasing. To love without ceasing. To love always, fully, without restraint. That all things should know love, not that I should love all things, but that all things should be loved.
I thought about plants and how they are nourished by the other organisms in the soil. An act of love I do believe. All things should be loved by whatever can love them. I could envision this wave of love rippling outward, growing ever larger. This small thing, the dawning of a life, be in human or carrot or mosquito, being nurtured. The magic of love and chemistry surround it and it lives as long as it will, be it a moment or years. And it is loved by whatever can love it. Sometimes it takes root and grows and sometimes it does not and is ended in the very beginning. Sometimes it takes root and grows and is cut short before what might have been its natural end. Sometimes it gets to live a full extent of life and slowly comes to an end. The love this being has received is not diminished by the length of its life. The love it has received cannot be compared to the love received by another and sometimes, the love received is from the same giver or givers. But still it cannot be compared one to the other.
Let's say the love is a visible thing. Like a wave radiating from the giver to the recipient. And the love received by the give can be traced back and back and back. The givers take many forms both alike and vastly different from the recipient. Echos of love going back to the first single cell. And then traveling the other way into the future, the capacity for love never diminishing. And because there are vast multitudes of givers, from what we consume as an act of love from the carrot for instance, which gathered love from the soil and the organisms therein, even if one source is no longer available, there is another source, always.
This idea that we are ever alone is really a misconception or misperception of the truth. Obviously, we are not required to see or acknowledge the gifts of love that we receive with each breath. I drink the water or eat the carrot and do not think of what has come together to make that happen. All of the energies that have come together in order for life to even exist. I don't really think of water as a life form, but it is certainly required for all life forms to exist, so it should count. Same thing with air. That is a rabbit hole I am not quite prepared to go down. The carrot, tree, mosquito, human carbon-based life form is quite rabbit hole enough for now.
I think humans have grown oblivious to love and our need for it and how we give it. We fight about what is right and what is wrong and forget to love one another. Even if we don't like one another. So much anger and bitterness everywhere I look. So looking inside myself to see the love that had to manifest for life to exist at all, that love is any type of chemical cooperation, I find myself blown away by the magnitude. It requires nothing by receiving on the part of the recipient. I look outside and see the sunlight on the petals of the cherry tree and the wind rustling the leaves. So much is happening there and I can ignore it all. But if the sunlight is love to the tree and the wind is bringing another type of love and the insects which visit the petals when the sun is warm and the winds are not too strong is yet another kind of love and the rain that fell earlier that fed the roots and all of the organisms that live in the soil around those roots and that are tending to one another through fungi which help facilitate communication between plants. It just goes on and on.
Right now, in my human world, people are taking sides over abortion. To end a life before it has a chance, to thin the carrot patch in order to let some grow bigger and stronger and healthier, some of the carrot seedlings are pulled. Those seedlings are still loved by the soil organisms and the rain and the sun. There is not room for all of them. The plant knows this when it sets seed, that some of the seeds will grow and others will not. Some will feed birds or turn back into the soil as nutrition for another time. What it received during its lifetime is not diminished by its end, nor is it less valuable as food for something else. To those lives that were ended, we are grateful, for it allowed another life to thrive, to have room to grow. Are the seedlings promised? I don't suppose that they are, no more than a life is promised other than to make the most of what you were given. Some lovely lives are ended early. Many lovely lives are. But this does not make them invaluable. Of course not.
Not everything gets to choose to love. I don't suppose the organisms in the soil actively choose to feed the seedling. But they still nourish. Some things take the life of another thing in order to feed itself. Perhaps that is part of the balance, like the thinning of the carrot patch.
I feel like I am at the door looking in and I can't quite get my mind around the idea of conscious love. But I feel strongly that I figure this out. That I love actively. That I pray for my neighbors, that I love them and tend to them, to my human neighbors, to my non -human neighbors, that I act consciously, to be aware of the impact I have. Yes, it is hard to know how to take a step forward, but if I at least give gratitude to all that nurtures me, I am starting somewhere.
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