Sometimes the word “love” falls easily off our lips. Other times that word can’t make it past the lump in our throats. Love is a word that must be felt to be understood. The more love is felt the less it can be reduced to words. In the end, love is a placeholder for something we cannot really say.
Our idea of love changes as we move through life. Our first idea of love is usually one of enlightened self-interest. It is said you must first love yourself, and then your circle grows to include close friends and family. This first kind of love begins like a mustard seed. Perhaps we love our toys, then our family, then our friends. Perhaps we even come to love our city and nation, but the idea of loving everyone seems a contradiction in terms. The first kind of love is understood primarily in terms of oneself.
There is a second love that pierces us from the outside in. This second love brings the piercing pain mythically depicted as Cupid’s arrows. This ego shattering kind of love may come as a romantic lover, it may be seen in the shining face of an infant, or when we behold something so moving that it pierces our prison of self-concern and opens us to the mystery of another.
This second love shatters the walls of our enlightened self-love and opens us, sometimes painfully, to a world where others are not extensions of our own interests but are ends in themselves. When we love children we can find sometimes find a more exquisite pleasure in their joy than in our own. The second kind of love may enjoy the last bit of ice cream in the mouth of the beloved more than in its own.
There is a third love that considers all of us to be branches on one tree. The third love is not experienced as a feeling so much as in a realization that we are interwoven with the trees of a forest, the stars in the sky, and with our entire human family.
We cannot hate our species without rejecting our own essence as well. Nor can this third kind love stand by passively in the face of injustice. Almost by definition, this love feels a call to protect and nurture the wounded without dehumanizing those doing the harm. The third love comes with the full realization that life on earth is not atomistic but ecological.
We cannot love a species in the same way we love a personal friend, but we can feel our interconnectedness down to our own soul. We can realize that our fates are interwoven. We can realize that violence, even when necessary, is more like an amputation than a victory.
Growing in love requires three leaps of faith. To love anyone or anything requires a courage to risk losing it. The second leap, to love another as other, requires losing the sense of oneself as the center of one’s own story. The third love cannot be understood in terms of the first or second love. The third love is not self love inflated, nor is it personal love expanded. The third love means drowning in the ocean of interconnectedness. It is the realization that we cannot stand independently from our human family, the web of life or the cosmic process itself. The third love is most simply and profoundly the realization that what we do to any being anywhere, we are ultimately doing to ourselves.