Love of Life

To engage people in more and more intimate relationship with their biosphere means literally, to fall in love. When love has kindled to passion, the boundaries disappear. The eyes of the beloved become like seas and we lose our sense of separateness as we eagerly plunge headlong into their depths.

When in love, we become much less selfish with our lover, instead, finding ways to give. Indeed, there is even a selflessness, and the one who had been an ‘I’ is thinking, chatting and behaving so much more as a ‘we.’ For now, there is an interdependence: a contemplation of the other as a part of the self.

To really know the biosphere is to love it. Wandering along Marshall Creek the one who had been ‘I’ gets left on the trail behind, until there is only an ‘us’ left. Just nature, and me. Then something happens, miraculously.

Even I and nature disappear as something envelopes the two of us, like perfume, and we sink in each others arms and become one. True, if you were not in love as he, you might still only apprehend one man walking along the creek, often with his dog, but that is not what is really happening.

That is just the surface, and the surface belies the truth, for he has paused enraptured, encircled and embedded in a miracle of bursting activity. The rising sun drawing to itself the luxurious leaves, silently tugging through their roots like babies at the breast of Mother Earth. A dragonfly droning by on a stately mission, a banana slug gliding along the forest leaf floor… Far from alone, the man you see is dancing within a mad passionate sea of life.

They say that two lovers are wonderfully mistaken when they feel they lose their ‘selves’ when in love. Moreover, they are chided with a ‘tsk, tsk’ and forwarned about losing their identity, power, and future. Facts, however, say differently.

When making love their union is so close, that half of each splits off, and joins with the other’s, and life goes on in the most intimate of DNA dances, encircling each other, dividing, dividing again until its nature as a child is fully seen as a living combination of both.

I say, lose your selves, toss them aside with delighted abandon. Feel the many bacterial and mitochondrial lives stirring within you as you glide among the trees along the creek like a blood cell drifting through a capillary. Breath in and breath out, exchanging your thread of existence with that of the surrounding leaves. Dive into the Earth like a lover into the arms of the beloved, and recognize your true self as that wonderful, rare and magnificent totality of Life.