Love isn’t a rom-com. We know this. And yet rom-coms with my love, with vanilla plant-based ice cream last night, are a sweet reminder of sweetness. Of the wonder of discovering love.
​
Love is what happens in that first flush, in that meet-cute…but it’s also what happens when we stick with it when the going gets tough…for months. For a year, even. For longer, perhaps, I’m told.

Love is what happens when we care about our lover, more than we care about our own feelings—but while caring for our own sensitive heart, too.
​
A little poem about the love that emerges after “Happily Ever After”:

Life is like that. The waves push forward, pull back. We turn left, or right. We expand, or contract.

All the while it’s our ethics, our heart’s ability to grow, our greenlit present moments guiding you each step of the way.

Who’s to say what is best. What is best is kindness. Care. Responsibility. Love.

What’s not best is greed, lies, hate, hurt. It’s simple really, even when it feels anything but.

This is fun. Sometimes hard. Sometimes the hardest thing you’ve ever done, just helping, breathing, looking at the trees with all your might so as to open to the next breath through nature, through dehumanizing disconnection. This, not a sweet 90s silly rom-com, is love. This is exertion as love language, three-fold generosity practice—I am empty of solidity, you are empty of solidity, this gift is empty of solidity. This is magic, the magic of trusting how things unfold as long as you pay attention and care. This is disconnection and connection and missed connections, healing and sadness in this tender heart and all of it swishing around in a loop that ends up with your head, dizzy; your heart, wondering—and then. You call a friend. You look out on the water, rippling in the sun, the goslings are getting big now.

And then stepping into the unknown with community behind lifting up and pushing the bird out of the nest, and great light silver white clouds ringed in sun against the blue wakening, calling out, all is possible, still, all is possible, even now.

Love is love. No strategy, a wise man reminded, is best strategy. No strategy means present moment, means caring, means trying. No strategy means love.