Love isn’t some hard to get commodity, it is right here now, waiting for you to accept it.
Most of us come up in this world with a very small idea of what love is.
We are brought up to believe we have to earn it or that it only exists in certain types of relationships. Culturally, we all come by these ideas honestly. It’s in the poetry we’ve read, the movies we’ve watched, the songs we’ve sung along to since forever. Somewhere along the way, we buy into this idea that love is transactional.
But love isn’t a prize you win. It is woven into every fiber of your being.
We just forget.
What Love Actually Is
The poet and author bell hooks offers us some clarity when they write that to truly love, we must learn to mix various ingredients: care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication. Most of us were never taught the full recipe — we have simply been working with an incomplete understanding of what Love is.
Author and founder of Centers for Spiritual Living, Ernest Holmes takes it further. He reminds us that love is not a sentiment. It is not a feeling that comes and goes. He writes that there is “but one ultimate impulsion (e.g. driving force) in the universe. This impulsion is love… It is the pure essence of Divine Givingness.”
The driving force of the Universe is Love. And that force is not coming at us from somewhere out there. It is arising from within us.
Ram Dass brings it home when he writes:
“Unconditional love really exists in each of us. It is part of our deep inner being. It is not so much an active emotion as a state of being. It’s not ‘I love you’ for this or that reason, not ‘I love you if you love me.’ It’s love for no reason, love without an object. It’s just sitting in love, a love that incorporates the chair and the room and permeates everything around. The thinking mind is extinguished in love.”
— Ram Dass, Be Love Now, p. 2
Love is a state of being… it’s just who we are. When we recognize this — when we begin to operate from Love— the small, grasping mind dissolves, and we remember our true nature.
Love Just Waits for Us.
Despite our inability to recognize that the longing we carry — that ache for intimacy, for belonging, for being truly known — is actually our longing for oneness.
Hold up… let me clarify what I mean by oneness. It’s like the Love you’ve been searching for and the Love that created you are the same Love… sit with that a moment.
Think of yourself like a wave in the ocean – the wave is still part of the ocean even when the force of the ocean shapes it into a wave… and that wave has enough power and force to carry things like surfers, but in the end it’s still one with the ocean.
Put in this context, our longing for Love seems a little silly… we are Love already. And best of all, Love doesn’t give up on us. Like the wave on the ocean it knows we are one with it.
Love is patient. It just waits.
It doesn’t withdraw when we can’t receive it. It doesn’t punish us for looking in the wrong places. It simply waits, while Life becomes our way-shower, ushering us back to center where Love patiently waits for us to receive it.
Sometimes that return to center is gentle. Sometimes, not so much. Life softens us, it opens us up— through our joy and through our heartbreak — until we can finally acknowledge what was always present. And when we do, it can feel like we’re letting love in. But what we’re really doing is letting love out.
Many of us spent years superimposing this longing onto relationships, and wanting to belong and be ‘chosen’. We weren’t wrong to want love — we just hadn’t yet landed on our real relationship with Source. As bell hooks reminds us, when we don’t know what love looks like, when we can’t recognize it, respect it, commit to it — we can’t fully give it or receive it.
It’s like holding your breath until you understand that love is what you are, not what you are seeking. Once you know this, you can exhale. And each breath after that becomes easier and freer.
The Treasure Was Always Here
There’s a story I’ve carried for years that captures this perfectly. You may know it.
There was a Persian farmer named Ali Hafed who owned a large, prosperous farm with orchards, grain-fields, and gardens. One day a Buddhist priest visited and spoke of diamonds — that a single mine could grant wealth beyond imagining. Ali Hafed became so consumed by the idea that he sold his farm, left his family with a neighbor, and set off on a lifelong quest to find his fortune.
He wandered. He spent everything. He found nothing. And in despair, he threw himself into the sea.
Meanwhile, the man who purchased his farm one day picked up an unusual rock. When the old priest visited again, he immediately recognized it as a diamond. They rushed outside and discovered the diamond mines of Golconda right there on the property.
Ali Hafed had been standing on acres of diamonds all along.
That’s how it is with Love. The love we seek isn’t somewhere else. The journey outward is real — sometimes life requires it, to get us back home to our center. In the end everything we’ve been looking for, we already have. The treasure was never across the sea. It was here. It has always been here.
Often we can’t see our own love but we can absolutely recognize it in others. Ernest Holmes writes in Richer Living: “When we let the love that is within us go out to the God who is in all people and the Divine Presence that is in all things, then we are loving God with all our heart and with all our soul and mind because we are recognizing that the Spirit within us is the same Spirit that we meet in others.”
The Way Forward
For the month of June, we are sitting with the theme of a Higher Deeper Love. And it begins right here — not with doing more, not with becoming more lovable, but with recognizing what is already true.
There are two well-worn pathways to awakening to the Love within you, both of them are effective. We can cultivate it through practice, contemplation, and turning inward. Or we can let life soften us through its challenges until we have no choice but to surrender and allow Love to make itself known. Both paths lead home. Like I said — Love is patient. It simply waits for us to let go of our search for something transactional, something outside of us; It waits until we can just be it.
My invitation to you this week is this: Be the love you seek.
As bell hooks writes so gently: “One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others.”
You are not lacking love. You never were. You are simply, beautifully, learning to recognize what you’ve been standing on all along.
