On love as a lens, a fuel, and a way of moving through the world.
I feel hugged from all sides
That is the truest thing I can say about where I am right now. Not in spite of the difficulty, but inside it, woven through it, stronger than it. The people in my life have shown up in ways that have left me speechless. Calls. Texts. Meals brought to my door. Invitations into homes. Words said out loud that needed to be said. Presence, simple and full.
This is what love looks like when it isn’t a feeling but a practice.
And it has made me want to write about love. Not the romantic kind, not the kind that lives in songs and movies and Valentine’s Day cards, but the bigger kind. The kind that is a choice, a lens, a fuel. The kind that, I have come to believe, is at the center of everything.
There is nothing you can do that can’t be done
The Beatles said it simply, the way the most important things usually are: All you need is love.
I used to think that was naive and a cliché. A beautiful idea, sure, but naive. The world is complicated. People are complicated. Love alone doesn’t pay bills or fix systems or undo harm.
I’ve been sitting with it differently lately.
Because what I’ve been experiencing, in the middle of one of the harder seasons of my life, is that love is not passive. It is not soft or simple or easy. Love, real love, is the most active thing I know. It shows up. It tells the truth. It stays when staying is hard. It feeds you when you forget to feed yourself. It accepts you, fully, not the curated version of you but the whole complicated human of you, and it chooses you anyway.
That is not naive. That is the most radical thing in the world.
There is nothing you can do that can’t be done. With love, I think that’s true. Not because love makes everything easy, but because love makes everything possible. It is the fuel. With it, everything unfolds.
What love actually looks like
Love shows up in small moments more than grand ones.
It is the text that arrives at exactly the right time. The friend who calls not to fix anything but just to be there. The meal someone made with their hands and brought to your door. The person who sits across from you in a hard conversation and stays, even when it’s uncomfortable, even when the truth takes a while to arrive.
It is shared excitement, doubled. Shared sadness, halved. It is the respect that lives underneath a difficult conversation, the willingness to be honest because the relationship is worth more than comfort.
And it is acceptance. This one, for me, is the deepest form of love there is. To be seen fully, the messy and the beautiful, the contradictions and the certainties, and to still be chosen. To still belong. That is not something I take lightly. That is everything.
I try to love the same way. To show up, to listen, to be present in the moments that matter. To say the words out loud rather than assuming people know. To make space for the people I love to be exactly who they are, without needing them to be different.
The first love
Before we know any other kind of love, there is mother love.
My mother was always nearby. Attentive, playful, scolding when scolding was needed, feeding me in every sense of the word. She signed me up for ballet jazz, piano, soccer, swimming, opening door after door into the world without ever making me feel pushed through them. She was simply there, consistently, warmly, fully.
I didn’t have a word for what she was giving me then. I do now.
In developmental psychology, there is a concept called the secure base. It comes from attachment theory, which I worked with for years in my work with children in Quebec. The idea is this: a child who feels securely attached to a caregiver will venture out into the world with confidence, explore, take risks, try new things, precisely because they know they can return. The caregiver is the home base. The place of safety and replenishment. The child goes out, gets overwhelmed or hurt or tired, comes back to be held, and then goes out again. Bolder each time.
That is what my mother gave me. Not just safety, but the freedom that comes from safety. The courage to explore because I always knew where home was.
And I think about this now in a much larger sense. Because Mother Nature does the same thing.
She holds us, sustains us, feeds us, shelters us, whether we acknowledge it or not. She is the original secure base, the one we all share regardless of where we were born or who our people are. She gives unconditionally, the way the best mothers do, cycling through seasons, absorbing what we take, offering what we need. And like children who have wandered too far from home, we are only now beginning to understand how much we depend on her. How lost we are without that connection.
Mother love. Mother Nature. The first love, and the largest one. Both teaching us the same thing: that from a place of being held, we can do anything.
Love as abundance
Here is what I’ve noticed about love: it multiplies.
When you give it, you don’t have less. You have more. The resources expand. The possibilities open. Love is not a finite thing that depletes with use. It is, as far as I can tell, the only thing in the world that grows by being given away.
I think about this in the context of the bigger love too. The love that extends beyond the people I know personally, toward strangers, toward the world, toward nature. That love feels like unity. Like the recognition that we are all in this together, all made of the same material, all carrying versions of the same needs and fears and hopes. When I feel that love, the world feels less divided. The possibilities feel less fixed.
Abundance in possibilities. That is what love feels like from the inside.
Love is the fuel
I am not a person who moves through the world on logic alone. I move on feeling, on connection, on the warmth of the people around me. Love has always been my compass.
And right now, in a season that has asked a lot of me, it is also my anchor. It is what has kept me calm when calm was hard to find. It is what has given me sense when sense was hard to make. It is what has made the hard things survivable and the beautiful things luminous.
The Beatles were right. Not naively, not simplistically, but in the deepest possible way.
All you need is love. Because with love, you have fuel. And with fuel, everything unfolds.
A note on self love
None of this works without one thing: loving yourself first.
Not in a selfish way. In a foundational way. The way you cannot pour from an empty cup, you cannot truly love others from a place of self-abandonment. Self-love is not a luxury or an indulgence. It is the source.
It looks like honoring your own needs. Like telling the truth about how you feel. Like allowing yourself to fall apart when falling apart is what’s needed, and trusting that you will find your way back. Like accepting yourself, not just the parts you’re proud of, but the clumsy parts, the contradictory parts, the parts still figuring it out.
When you love yourself that way, the love you have for others becomes cleaner. More generous. Less conditional.
It all starts there.
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