Love

Love. Someone once told me you can’t hate anyone you don’t love. Emotions are so tied up with one another, and so difficult to sort out. And the more powerful the emotion, the less we have control over which way the feeling can swing. What do you think is the most necessary part of loving someone—is it devotion? Passion? Fear? Longevity of relationship? Trust? I’ve known I’ve loved someone in an instant. With other people, it has taken years to realise how much they mean to me. Sometimes love happens for a blissful moment, and sometimes it endures for a long time. The only way that I can make sense of love is to think of how strong of an effect someone or something has over me.

I fell in love with a tree once. I know that sounds ridiculous, but I came to understand a great deal about my own humanity and life one day when passing by a tree, and realising how long it had been there, thinking about what its world was like, hundreds of years before I was ever there, and how it the world would be without me. You might say that was just a moment of clarity, that could have happened anywhere, brought on by any number of things. And you’d be right. But how is that different from relationships with people? When you meet a person, and spend years with a person, the real marker of the impact they’ve had on you, the real life of loving them, can really be seen in how much it makes you a different, more insightful, more rich and full person. So a tree, one day, helped to instigate a powerful revelation for me that resides with me to this day. I must have fallen in love.