The Love Underneath The Love

Let us love like trees do.

Hi,

How are you this week? What is it in your being that loves the most?

Foliage (1899) by Gustaf Fjæstad (Swedish, 1868 - 1948)

There’s the surface-level love — the affection we have for others in exchange for their kindness, care, inspiration, wisdom and support. It’s the kind of love that is instantly accessible to us, and which, therefore, we’re the most familiar with.

And then, there’s the love underneath the love. The primordial, cornerstone kind of love on which the whole construct of our beings is formed. Because it resides at the root, it can take us lifetimes to embody it. But just because there’s a struggle, doesn’t mean we can’t do something.

This is what Buddhists call “metta” (loving-kindness) and what Pádraig Ó Tuama referred to as “love underneath the love” in his poem “Oremus (let us pray)”. This root-level love extends beyond personal attachments to encompass all beings. It is impersonal and is not based on desire or possession but on a deep recognition of interconnectedness and compassion.

In my daily post-meditation prayer, I say, “May I have a big and open heart that encompasses the whole world.” In it, I call for this deep-rooted, unwavering love to come forth and transform me.

Why do we love?

As we explore the landscapes of love, let us begin with the genesis. Why do we love? Why do we put effort into anything at all? Why do we try and fight even when things seem lost? We all know love is bound to be as painful as it is beautiful, and yet, we still dare to love – why? I don’t mean only romantic love here. Our hearts home so many objects of affection: our pets, our families, our friends, our beloved places, our favourite ways of living, our very selves, and more. Why do we love then, knowing it is such a risky business?

The answer to all is, in short, because we’re capable of it. It is one of our greatest potentialities.

“You know that the price of life is death, that the price of love is loss, and still you watch the golden afternoon light fall on a face you love, knowing that the light will soon fade, knowing that the loving face too will one day fade to indifference or bone, and you love anyway — because life is transient but possible, because love alone bridges the impossible and the eternal,” writes Maria Popova of The Marginalian in “Love Anyway”.

We love because our hearts are destined to love. Our hands are made for effort: of building, of holding, of nurturing. Our bodies are designed to feel the fullest when they’re surrounded by the tender bodies of others. We love because we have faith: in others, ourselves, and in life. And even though we know its nature is just the same as everything else’s – it passes – we try to sustain it as long as we can.

When a relationship, a family, a situation, or a life in its entirety ends, it doesn’t mean the love that sustained them ends. It also doesn’t mean we become less capable of continuing to offer love to others, or ourselves as a result. Being an unconditional, untethered quality, love remains in us, regardless of the external circumstances. That’s because when the surface-level love runs its course, which is dependent on the transaction of needs we perform between each other, the root-level love begins to flow upwards, nurturing both our wounded hearts and those of others. It can go as far as to soothe the pains of the world. This kind of love is like a nutrient-rich substance that flows through us all, holding this world together. It could be the same mechanism that sustains forests.

When a tree is cut down in a forest, other trees reach out to the victim with their root tips and send life-saving sustenance, water, sugar and other nutrients by the mycelium. This continuous IV-drip from neighbouring trees can keep the stump alive for decades and even centuries. And they don't only do it for their own kind, they do it for the trees of other species, too. “Is it because they know that their lives depend on the health of the whole forest, and even on beings very different from themselves? Is it possible that the trees can think in longer terms than we do?” asks Neil deGrasse Tyson in Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.

Just like the trees sustain their cut-down kins for years, root-level love helps us endure life’s transitions because, as Leo Tolstoy wrote, it is “the sole and legitimate manifestation of life.”

We can’t help but love.

We are loving beings.

And yet, we fear this deepest nature of ours.

The nature of love underneath the love

They say that the greatest courage of all is to feel all the hurt and fear and still choose to walk with your heart open.

But I disagree.

I think it requires more humility than courage to do so. It requires one to admit they’re being limited by their personal experiences and ideas of life. It requires acceptance that we’ve only seen so much and that we don’t know the best, not most of the time, at least.

Our past experiences shape our perceptions, making us struggle to love and be loved in unfamiliar ways. We fear that “giving too much of ourselves is a risk, that we are a limited resource and must protect ourselves from a menacing world that would exploit and drain us if we let it, if we open our hearts too much. We fear there would be nothing left for ourselves. We feel vulnerable. We feel scared. We feel vigilant, jealous; protective of this entity we call ‘self,’” as

Don Boivin

wrote in his essay titled “Is Love Just a Fairy Tale?”.

As I ponder this, the words of Hannah Arendt come to mind. She equates love with desire, explaining how our love shapes our identities and perceptions.

“Desire mediates between subject and object, and it annihilates the distance between them by transforming the subject into a lover and the object into the beloved. For the lover is never isolated from what he loves; he belongs to it… Since man is not self-sufficient and therefore always desires something outside himself, the question of who he is can only be resolved by the object of his desire and not, as the Stoics thought, by the suppression of the impulse of desire itself: “Such is each as is his love” [Augustine wrote]. Strictly speaking, he who does not love and desire at all is a nobody.”

According to Arendt, desire bridges the gap between the self and the other, transforming the self into a lover and the other into the beloved. This integration means that a person’s identity is significantly shaped by their desires and the objects of those desires. Once we let ourselves love and be loved, the boundaries between “us” and “them” become blurry. This is why we might fear love. When we integrate the object of our love into our beings, we might indeed feel like there would be nothing left for ourselves, as Don wrote, and we’d vanish.

While Arendt suggests that without love and desire, one is a "nobody," and we might certainly feel this way when things end, Thich Nhat Hanh deepens this idea by showing that our existence is deeply intertwined with everything and everyone around us — not only the objects of our desire.

Becoming a “nobody” in love doesn’t mean losing ourselves or becoming incomplete. On the contrary, we become fuller and more capable when we recognise that the quality of love throbbing within us is the same substance our partner, child, parent, sibling, friend or pet is made of. This realisation of love as interbeing frees us to offer love beyond personal limitations.

“Often, when we say, “I love you” we focus mostly on the idea of the “I” who is doing the loving and less on the quality of the love that’s being offered. This is because we are caught by the idea of self. We think we have a self. But there is no such thing as an individual separate self. A flower is made only of non-flower elements, such as chlorophyll, sunlight, and water. If we were to remove all the non-flower elements from the flower, there would be no flower left. A flower cannot be by herself alone. A flower can only inter-be with all of us… Humans are like this too. We can’t exist by ourselves alone. We can only inter-be. I am made only of non-me elements, such as the Earth, the sun, parents, and ancestors. In a relationship, if you can see the nature of interbeing between you and the other person, you can see that his suffering is your own suffering, and your happiness is his own happiness. With this way of seeing, you speak and act differently. This in itself can relieve so much suffering.”

So, on one hand, we have Arendt’s argument on love that our identities are profoundly defined by what and whom we love; Thich Nhat Hanh, on the other hand, offers a complementary view that love and our very being are intertwined with the entire universe. This deep, impersonal love, akin to the nurturing flow in the forest, is what sustains us and connects us to all life. It is the true substance we are made of, always present, self-sustaining and all-sustaining, beyond the transient, possessive, and conditional love that we often experience.

Exploring both surface-level and root-level love reveals deeper truths about our nature and identity. By integrating Arendt's view of desire shaping our identities with Thich Nhat Hanh's concept of interbeing, we can form a more comprehensive understanding of love’s transformative power — and our own untethered potential.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. (…) And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

— Marianne Williamson

Stretching the limit

Opening our hearts wider is an act of finally ceasing the fight against our deepest potential. It’s spreading yourself across the four corners of the world for everyone to see what you’re made of. And you also better take a good look.

Isn’t this journey of life exhilarating? And exhausting, terrifying, painful? But at the same time, so tender, so beautiful. Our potential to love, to do the things we thought we’d never do because they stood at odds with our beliefs, concepts, and desires.

Stretching our limits is, I find, stretching the limits of our love.

By doing it, we can finally recognise that nothing is beyond love. We can be as ugly, mean, ungrateful, shameful, confused, and selfish as we want—and still, we’re not beyond love. The whole world might be repulsive, filled with hatred, fear, suffering, chaos, anger, cruelty, and despair—and still, it is not beyond love.

Once we understand that, it’s only a matter of time until all other limits fall off, like the autumn leaves.

One of such limits is the fear of our potential.

I think we don’t talk about love much, outside of romance, because we’re scared of it.

It strips us bare to the bones, leaving us with nowhere to hide in its light. We know all too well its potential to transform us and our lives; we can sense it in each breath. It is there, deep within us: love underneath the love—and that’s what we fear. Because it’s unknown, mysterious, and not what we are accustomed to. We don’t know what it will demand of us.

This is the kind of love I wrote about in my recent Note:

We, as humans, are capable of supporting and feeling compassion for victims on both sides of any conflict, not just one.

We are also, even if it might seem impossible at times, capable of feeling compassion for those responsible for unleashing and continuing those atrocities.

Love is not a limited resource. Our hearts can home the whole world, and that’s what they’ve been made for.

Let’s remember that it makes a tremendous difference to condemn actions versus condemning people.

We won’t get anywhere as a species if we fight hatred with hatred.

We have the capacity to feel love for all humans, regardless of their actions, and still stand for the victims of those actions, doing what we can to prevent more suffering. One doesn’t, and I believe, shouldn’t, exclude the other.

Suffering is universal; it doesn’t belong to anyone. If one nation suffers, no other nation can sleep peacefully. Deep down in our hearts, we sense that we cannot know happiness if it comes at the cost of someone else’s pain.

Freedom for all comes from a deep recognition of interbeing, a term used by Thich Nhat Hanh to describe engaged, actionable love.

Until we are all free, no being is.

Until we all love, nobody can be loved fully.

Let’s use this yearning to transform our world.

Sometimes, it’s easier to remain entrenched in our convictions and ideas about how life events, including the big happening of love, should go because finding out for ourselves is hard and terrifying. It goes against our instincts. It calls us to emerge from our tiny safe nests and walk into the world empty-handed. Nobody wants to be left without the means to defend themselves.

But we forget that empty hands can mean something else yet. When we’re no longer busy holding onto our perceptions and desires (“self”), our empty hands finally have room and readiness to fulfil their inherent role: to truly embrace and hold.

Perhaps this is how we can return to the roots of who we are — by humbly opening up to the impersonal, untethered love we’re all made of.

Recognising love's universal, practical, and interconnected nature allows us to foster compassion and solidarity across all boundaries. In doing so, we tap into a love that not only nurtures our individual souls but also has the potential to heal, sustain, and transform the world.

“Stretching the Limit” by Evan M. Cohen

Question to you, dear reader:

What do you want to transform?

With much love,

Justyna