Isn’t Life a Form of Love?

Loving in a vast universe.

Hi,

How are you this week? Do you feel loved?

The Coast of Labrador (1866) by William Bradford (American, 1823-1892)

Love is a lifelong lesson. We can never say we’ve mastered the art of it. No two moments of love are equal; we never love the same twice.

The journey of our hearts is the most humbling yet most fulfilling one. It keeps bringing out our deeply hidden shadows, forcing us to confront the unsightly parts of our characters, and more often than not—it squeezes us out from our comfortable seats and shoots us straight into the cosmos of growth. It never warns us when and how it’ll act, and it always finds ways to strip us of all the protective layers—down to the very core of our beings.

Love can be a scary thing. And people say love hurts. But I don’t think that’s true. Love never hurts. What we do with it and for it can hurt.

Love itself is too pure and vast to walk down into the cellars of sorrow. Instead, it sees us stranded there, over and over again. And it remains present, always keeping its door open, assisting us with every step up, encouraging us to return to its light and warmth, where we can rest. It’s available to each and every one of us. The door is always open. The light is always on.

When we feel banished from the familiar lands of love, contrary to what we might think, we don’t lose the capacity to love nor grow unworthy of it. Where we are, love is present too. Love is the default state of every human being. We just get a little lost at times, but it’s okay. All we need to do is to find our way back to it. We can never lose it completely. It’s always present. Always accessible to us—within us.

Love just is. And when we see it as such, it can never do us harm. When we truly understand it, we will see that love, itself, doesn’t bring suffering. It only brings healing. It only turns pain into medicine.

Love is sourceless. It’s equally available to each of us, whether we walk solo, as a couple, or in a group. You can stand alone, with bare feet and empty hands, and still feel your existence overflowing with love. It is something that connects us all. Deep down, below all the human-created layers of social and cultural formation, our core is a free flow of love. We always have access to it. It is our default state of being. A human being is a loving being.

But we tend to forget about it. When we forget that our most basic state is love, we then start to think that we need to ask for it from others, and in order to receive it, we need to perform in a certain way—so that we can deserve and earn it.

Once we lose the connection with our own love—our core—we start chasing it outside. And when we set out on the hunt, we start craving it. When we are craving, we deepen our sense of perceived lack. A deepened sense of lack creates suffering.

And so, we suffer because of our misunderstanding of love. Not because “oooh love hurts,” as the song says. We suffer because we lost the touch of love within ourselves. We lost the most fundamental understanding of it—that love is not something to be gained; it’s something that just is, that we are.

Simply remembering that love is always at our core, always accessible to us in abundance, can help us become less frightened of losing the expressions of it from others, less desperate to find it outside, and more balanced in times of adversity. We are not lonely planets floating in the loveless universe. We are all connected. And that connection is love at our core.

Love moves us like dark matter moves the universe

Carl Sagan was an astronomer, known for his ability to convey the awe-inspiring scale of the cosmos. He often reminded us of our smallness in the grand scheme of the universe. Even without his help, we all can recall those intrusive, incapacitating moments when we suddenly remember the overwhelming vastness of space and time that can make our individual human lives seem painfully insignificant.

However, despite this apparent insignificance of human life when viewed against the backdrop of the cosmos, Sagan suggests that there is something we inherently contain, which makes this vastness bearable: love. “For small creatures such as we, the vastness is bearable only through love,” he wrote in his book “Contact” (1985).

Love, in its many forms—romantic, familial, platonic, and universal—provides meaning, warmth, and connection. It's a fundamental part of the human experience that helps us navigate and find purpose in the vast, indifferent universe. As a scientist, Sagan was deeply aware of the enormity of the cosmos and the complexity of life. His work often bridged the gap between science and philosophy, suggesting that while science helps us understand the universe, love helps us find our place within it.

The force of love is not foreign to scientists. A mission scientist with NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, Natalie Batalha, compares love to dark matter. “Ninety-five percent of the mass of the universe [is] something we can’t even see, and yet it moves us. It draws us. It creates galaxies. We’re moving on a current of this gravitational field created by mostly stuff that we can’t see,” she explains in her interview with Krista Tipett for On Being.

Just as the dark matter moves the universe, love moves us too, influencing our lives in profound yet often unseen ways. It permeates our history, culture, thoughts and dreams. It is present everywhere and affects us deeply, even though we might not always comprehend it fully.

Batalha explains how her work as a scientist and this romantically-sounding but deeply pragmatic understanding of love provided her with a perspective emphasising our interconnectedness: “(…) when you study science, you step out of planet Earth. You look back down at this blue sphere and you see a world with no borders.”

But this borderless perspective of the universe takes her even deeper. She continues to say how it took billions of years for the atoms that compose our bodies to come together and make beings that are able to take a conscious look at the universe. We are all made of stardust, connected through the same cosmic origins. This realisation of our interconnectedness at the very physical level—that we are essentially the universe observing itself through the bodily senses—is both humbling and awe-inspiring. It can propel us to do more, and be more: to embody the boundless love that we are.

With this understanding in mind, Natalie goes on to ponder the potential of extending our capacity of love beyond our immediate relationships to a broader, more universal scope. She wonders about the implications of connecting not just with humans on Earth but with all beings—including the other species in the universe. This expanded concept of love could transform our interactions and perspectives, opening up new possibilities for connection and empathy on a cosmic scale. This is our potential, this is the force that moves us.

Becoming the love that you are

As we connect with the essence of ourselves, the unconditional love throbbing deep within our beings, we expand our horizons, revealing new landscapes of love that we inhabit. As Carl Sagan reminded us, in a universe that can often seem cold and indifferent, love and human connection provide warmth and meaning, helping us to bear the vastness of existence.

But it doesn’t have to apply to romantic love only, which most of us tend to think of in the first moment. Following Batalha’s thought, we can expand our loving capacity to envelop the entire interstellar existence of all things. If love, like dark matter, is the force moving our lives, then life is a form of love.

When we arrive at the shoreline of love that we shared with another being—when a relationship runs its course, when death swallows the shape of a beloved, when a pet leaves our caring arms, we face the endless expanse of the ocean of sorrow. And yet, we might remember, that this ocean, too, is made of stardust. The force moving its waves, washing all over us, is what moves us, too: it is love, in its all-pervading nature. Floating in the ocean of sorrow, we’re no less capable of love than we were before.

With our hearts drenched and our minds flooded, we can still love and feel loved. This kind of love is not expressed through accepting or rejecting parts of who you are. It doesn’t depend on whether someone else offers it to us or not. It perseveres through the storms of our lives because it is not affected by external conditions. It is the boundless, pure force that moves our beings toward the light.

Loving yourself to the other side of the ocean of suffering might be less about body positivity or mental and self-improvement work (although they’re incredibly important, too).

Perhaps loving yourself is more of an act of opening up right where you hurt, of letting the cracks in your heart get filled with gold, like with honey, offering sweet consolation to the parts of you that still feel scared, small, and unworthy.

Perhaps it means stepping out into the world with nothing to hide and nothing to lose and, at last, recognising particles of the stardust you’re made of in all the other life forms around you.

Perhaps, to love yourself, you need to forget all that you are, are not, or wish to be—and focus on the only thing that remains: being a form of love.

P.S. The title is inspired by a comment left by one of my wonderful readers,

Forrest Beway

. Thank you!

This week I moved to Portugal, and with a friend I met here, we visited a local meditation centre. It always feels so special to meditate in a group. I hope I will be able to come more often! We arrived a bit ahead of time which allowed us to explore the beautiful wild gardens surrounding the centre, smelling of eucalyptus and flowers whose names I don’t know yet, but that will change soon. David Whyte wrote that “alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity” and through staying alert and open to the possibilities of this place, I am slowly making it feel like home 🌿

Question to you, dear reader:

What makes you believe you’re beyond love?

With much love,

Justyna