Dear Lovelets —
Have you been hunting for it, since forever?
Have you been looking for love as hard as I’ve been looking for love your whole entire lives?
Have you been trying to find it in other people, in success, in attainments, in substances, in food, in escape, in adventure, in hiding, in being good, in being bad, in someone else’s rules and visions about spirituality, in someone else’s rules and visions about YOU?
Oh hell yeah, me too.
Me too, my tired and beautiful friends.
In the Book of Job, a suffering voice raises up to the heavens to ask, “Where is wisdom to be found?” and the answer comes as a series of nots. You can’t find wisdom here or there, the seeker is told, the way you can find silver in a mine. You can’t find it just anywhere you look. Turn over every rock, but you won’t find wisdom hiding under them. It’s not in the land of the living. It’s not in the depth of the sea. It’s not here, it’s not there. So where is it? WHERE IS IT?
This brings to mind the wisdom of the yogic tradition which says that God can be described as “Neti, Neti” — not this, not this.
Insert the word “love” for “wisdom” or “God,” and you have a pretty good idea of what my restless, lifelong searching has looked like.
How do you find something invisible?
Where can Love be found?
That is our question this week, and I suggest that you ask it directly of Love itself.
Then get very quiet, and listen for the answer. Trust the answer. Whatever arises, know this: you are so, so loved.
And speaking of love — which we tend to do here — our special guest this week, the truly original, deeply talented writer Samantha Irby, was able to tap into the spirit of Unconditional Love well enough to discover that 1) it exists, “really and truly, even though it sounds fake” (!) and 2) it’s not going anywhere, despite her thorough listing of supposed faults. Sam, I’m with Love on this: you’re perfect just as you are.
Can’t wait to read everyone’s letters!
Love,
Your Lizzy
Dear Love, where are you to be found?
Oh sweetheart, you certainly have been looking for me, haven’t you? You have indeed been a miner for a heart of gold. Tireless you have been in your search for me — trying with every muscle in your being not only to hunt Love down, but once you had found what felt like Love, to lock it down and secure it, to attach yourself to it like a moray eel, or to latch onto it like a breastfeeding baby, to gaze into its eyes afraid to blink, afraid it might be taken away.
None of this is wrong. You are not in trouble for the search. If anything, I love you more for it. I love you more for trying to generate love, for trying to force people to love you, for trying to figure out what it is — the magical thing you must become in order to be loved, in order to STAY loved, for not giving up.
It would have been easy to give up after the first heartbreak. Or the tenth. But still you suited up and armored up and willed yourself to go out there and find love, because damn it, you knew it was out there somewhere.
And you were not wrong. It is out there — not only somewhere, but everywhere.
But come close to me now and let me whisper the secret to you. Let me tell you where I can be found.
I am not exactly in the form of people, places, and things, but I dwell in all the spaces between them — all the spaces within you. I am everything that is NOT what you behold with your senses, which is 99% of everything.
You had a vision of this once in meditation. (Okay, you were blasted out of your mind on drugs, but whatever gets you there, we don’t mind.) You had learned, because the smart scientists and physicists say so, that only 5% of the universe is known matter and the rest is unknown — which they call either dark matter or dark energy, and which they cannot measure or name or figure out.
Honeyhead, what could that mysterious non-substance, non-matter, unnameable, unmeasurable presence be but me? What could it be but Love? How else could I constantly say to you, “I’m right here. I’m within everything. I’m everywhere”?
Little parrot finch, take a pause from this letter and go look it up: Go ask your friend Google what percentage of the human body is so-called empty space.
Yep.
99.999999999% empty. Every atom of you is full of space, full of emptiness. That’s what you are. That’s what everyone is. There’s hardly anything to you that isn’t space and emptiness. Except “space” and “emptiness” are the wrong words for it.
You already know the right word for it. And you don’t have to be high to get it anymore, and you don’t have to be latched onto what you call “someone else” to know that anymore.
Be still, my little weather balloon, and stop seeking. Stop asking everyone for the answer and start knowing what you already know. Enter into the vast, vast, unimaginable spaciousness that is very nearly everything inside you and outside what you call “you” — and know that it is us, it is me, it is Love.
Where could we be, my love, but everywhere?
I love you. Sit quietly with this now, and be at peace.
Prompt
This week, I invite you to join me in posing this question: Dear Love, where are you to be found? Of course if you’d prefer, you can always ask the spirit of Unconditional Love the customary question which has never failed me: What would you have me know today?
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