Love saved my life. The love I’m talking about wasn’t given by a parent, grandparent or romantic partner.
That kind of love is a gift, but it isn’t the only love, and it’s not the kind that will save us. There is also an all-encompassing love that we must touch into ourselves.
Love as I understand and experience is energy, a power of good. We all must make the decision to engage with it. This is always a choice, for unlike fear and violence, love will not overpower you.
We all have equal access to this power, though many people have lost that connection because of a culture that doesn’t value it, or by being mistreated by a person, people or a system.
I know that disconnection; I have lived it, and I know it can be healed.
Below is a letter I wrote to a friend of mine who was facing a cancer diagnosis. It is my answer to her long-held question to me: “What is love?”
Dear Polly,
You’ve asked me for a long time, my friend, to write about my understanding of love.
The day I saw your beautiful smile waver was the day I knew it was time to speak my truth aloud, for you.
Because that’s what love does.
Love enters into pain.
Love walks toward the places where too many people are afraid to go – the places where we feel the most alone and sometimes powerless.
Love holds space.
It holds memories, if and until we are ready to remember.
Love is an ever-present energy we must choose, for fear, cynicism, and greed are always waiting by its side.
Love is relational. It is an exchange within ourselves, between two or more people or animals, and between people, animals and the Earth.
Love is experienced in the exchange between us and everything we value, including inanimate objects, musical instruments, or a favorite chair on the summer dock.
Love protects, even as it connects and ends isolation. It moves at our speed.
Love is beautiful, nowhere more poignant than when it is felt in the hardest of times. Beautiful love is when we cry and don’t give a damn how we look. It is when we sob angry sobs, and our eyes are blood red. Beautiful love is when we call and ask for help. Beautiful love is when we turn to another and say, “I see you” and mean it.
Love always moves toward the next right action. If we keep following it day by day, it will lead us to the flowing river, the wellspring that bends toward unity, compassion and truth.
Love is brave even as it is humble. It shows its strength in the places where intellect and heart intertwine. Brave love is vulnerability, truth telling, and daring to take risks.
At the same time, love is paradoxical and mysterious. It is never changing and ever changing, personal and universal.
Love speaks all languages, even curse words and silence. Perhaps, especially those.
Oh, and love laughs, belly laughs and quiet laughs. Sometimes, it laughs and cries at the same time.
Love has an uncanny ability to know where the need is, and to go there.
Love is accessible regardless of physical distance because love knows no boundaries; it is much larger than that.
Above all, dear One, as you sit where you are today, know that love is eternal. It never ends with death. Love lives on and on and on, even in its changing form.
Love. Its circles are everywhere, through all the seasons of our lives.
May your seasons be seasons of love.
*****
The above column was published in The Daily News of Newburyport on April 17, 2026