Somewhere to wander.

I read something recently — meant to comfort a friend of mine who was grieving — that I couldn't shake, and not in a good way. It was one of those pieces written to help people through loss, maybe C.S. Lewis, maybe someone else, I honestly can't remember. The argument went like this: the depth of your grief is proof of the depth of your love. Love someone enormously, and when they're gone, your pain will be enormous too. It's meant as comfort — if you're devastated, at least you know it's because you loved deeply. It took me a minute to figure out why that was bothering me so much, and then it became obvious. Love and pain are being treated as the same current, as if one just naturally converts into the other when the person dies. And I don't believe that for a second. Love doesn't cause pain. Love causes love. Love is love. Say it as many times as you need to until it actually lands: love will not build you an environment for suffering. Why would it do that? Why would the thing that is, by definition, the opposite of harm, turn around and manufacture harm the moment someone you love dies?

I know this is a hard sell for anyone who has actually lost someone — a child, a spouse, a friend — and felt the floor go out from under them. I'm not telling you that grief isn't real, or that it doesn't happen. I'm telling you it isn't the love doing it. The love you had for that person is still there, untouched, exactly as it was. There is no reason on earth that your love for someone, the moment they die, has to transform itself into pain. You're allowed to have both — you can love someone and miss them and be sad they're gone. That's fine. But somewhere along the way we decided that love has to convert into grief, that if you don't suffer enough at the loss you somehow didn't love enough, and I think that's a bastardization of something that was never built to hold suffering in the first place. What's actually happening is that instead of holding the memory of that person in gratitude for the time you got, you've taken it and filled it with loss — with the idea that something has been taken from you. But nothing has been taken. You're not going to get any new memories, sure, but you haven't lost the ones you have. The moment you attach grief to them, you're the one who ruins them, not death.

Here's the part that took me longest to see: a lot of what people call grief isn't really sadness at the loss — it's guilt. It's the thought that you could have done something, that it was somehow unfair, that it was somehow your fault. That guilt is doing the damage, not the love, and it's turning what should be a kind, warm, loving memory of someone into a wound instead. People move in and out of your life constantly and it isn't always death that does it — a new job, a new relationship, distance, time. You don't wake up every day mourning everyone you knew in high school. You just remember the ones you can fondly, and let the rest go quietly. There's nothing stopping you from doing the same thing with death, except the story you've been told about what you're supposed to feel. And for what it's worth, from what I've read about people who've had near-death experiences, the overwhelming majority come back with either no memory of distress at all, or something genuinely beautiful. That alone should tell you something about what's actually waiting on the other side of the thing we're all so afraid of.

So if you want to blame love for your grief, you can. Nobody's going to stop you. But it isn't love doing it — it's you, making a choice, usually without even realizing you're making it, to take something pure and turn it into sorrow. Love only does one thing. It creates more love. Everything else is a decision you're layering on top of it.

Questions to sit with

1. Pick the Station — When you think about someone you've lost, which memory do you tend to return to: the loving one, or the losing one? Which one are you choosing to keep alive?
2. Stop the Signal — Is there a grief you're carrying right now that's actually guilt wearing grief's clothing? What would change if you named it correctly?
3. Love Wins — If love only ever creates more love, what would it look like to let a painful memory become a grateful one instead?

This lesson touches the Buddhist teaching of the "second arrow" — that pain is inevitable, but the suffering we add on top of it is a choice we make, not a law of nature.

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Here's the part I really want to land, though: forgiveness is silent. Once you actually forgive something, that's it. You don't narrate it all day. You don't bring it up again next week "because last time it was like this." So say Becky pisses you off, and you tell her, "I forgive you, Becky, just don't ever do it again." That's not how it works.

If you're actually forgiving her, it's "I forgive you, Becky, and I forgive myself for thinking it was you who did it." And here's where it got interesting to me as I was saying it out loud: if you're good at non-judgment, you almost never need forgiveness in the first place. There's nothing to forgive because you never decided there was anything wrong.

Picture it — Becky does something, you say "I don't like that," and she says "what thing? What did I do?" And you realize it was two minutes ago. Why are you still mad about something that isn't even currently happening anymore? You're the one dragging it along. By the time you're capable of judging a moment, that moment's already gone — it's already different. So what exactly are you judging? Either way, you're arguing with a ghost.

Questions to sit with

1. Stop the Signal — What are you currently narrating to yourself about, on repeat, that you'd stop needing to forgive at all if you just stopped narrating it?
2. Set the Tone — If forgiveness is supposed to be silent, what conversation are you still having — out loud or in your own head — about something you already claim to have let go of?
3. Love Wins — Who are you still holding to something that, by the clock, happened two minutes ago — but that you've been running on a loop ever since?

This isn't a new idea — the Stoics drew a similar line between what's "up to us" and what isn't, and Buddhist teaching on equanimity points at the same target: meeting things without the reflexive labeling that creates something to forgive in the first place.

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I want to talk about love, which is a subject I keep coming back to because I still don't fully have it pinned down. Here's what I do know: it isn't a physical reaction. It's not going to announce itself in your body the way hunger does, with a growl or an ache that tells you exactly what's wrong. Love doesn't come with a physical signature like that. It's something that happens on the inside, not the external — at least the kind of love I'm talking about, the love that comes from the Creator, from the Father, from the Divine. That's a mental thing, a non-physical thing. If you're waiting to feel tingles or goosebumps to know it's real, you're going to be waiting a long time, because I think love is closer to an idea than a sensation.

Because it comes from the inside — because it's something I was given rather than something I can go out and get — the way toward it isn't chasing it down. It's removal. I think it works the same way happiness does: you don't find happiness so much as you get rid of everything standing between you and it. Same with love. You get rid of what's blocking you from feeling it. Sometimes that's literal — removing a person, a situation, an old habit from your life entirely. And sometimes it's not removal at all, it's forgiveness — choosing to let go of what someone did so it stops occupying space in you. Forgiving someone can clear a blockage just as thoroughly as cutting them out ever could. The tricky part is that most people don't actually know what they're doing when they think they're loving someone. They think they know, and they're wrong, and that's okay — but to actually discover what love is, you have to give it freely, and the only being I know of who's guaranteed to return it fully is the Creator. Everyone else, you take your chances.

That's not cynicism — it's just honesty about how love gets used between people. A lot of what gets called love from other people in your life is more complicated than it looks. Ask yourself honestly: is this person giving you love because they want something from you, or because you want it to be true and you've decided to believe it is? This shows up most with family — parents, siblings — where everyone assumes there's some obligation baked in, that you have to love your brother or your sister because that's the rule. It isn't. Nobody's obligated to love anybody. It's a choice, every time, and it has to be unconditional or it isn't really love — it's a transaction with expectations attached.

The one experience I can point to that felt like the real thing happened maybe three or four seconds, years ago, right when I first started putting serious effort into my own growth. It felt like dipping a toe into a pool, and the pool was the Creator's love, and my toe was just — my toe. Overwhelming, convincing, unmistakably real, even in that small a dose. I don't think most of us have had the chance to really know what that love is yet, myself included most days. But I got a taste of it once, and it's enough to keep me pointed in the right direction.

Questions to sit with

1. Listen — Is there a blockage in you right now — a grudge, a habit, a person — that forgiveness could clear more cleanly than removal ever could?
2. Set the Tone — Where in your life are you expecting love back as a condition, rather than giving it freely and letting it be its own reward?
3. Pick the Station — If love isn't a feeling you chase but a static you clear away, what's the next piece of static you're ready to let go of?

This lesson echoes A Course in Miracles' teaching that love is not something to be earned or acquired but the natural state already within us — the work is only ever removing the barriers to its awareness.

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That got me thinking about my own body, because it's doing the exact same thing, and I don't actually run it. You can raise your thumb right now — go ahead. But do you know what's actually happening to make that occur? Which synapses fire, which nerves carry the signal, which muscle tissue contracts? No. You just decide to raise your thumb, and a system you've never once consciously operated goes and does it for you.

So when people struggle with the idea of one God controlling everything — how can one thing be in charge of all of this — I think the answer is sitting right there in your own body. Is anyone actively "in charge" of your digestion, directing it moment to moment? No. It's just extremely good at running itself, and it doesn't need a supervisor standing over it barking instructions.

I think the universe runs the same way — self-operating, no external control needed, because it was never built to need one. The reason there can be "one thing" in control of everything is that the one thing IS everything, and everything, it turns out, is entirely capable of running itself without being managed.

Questions to sit with

1. Stop the Signal — What's something your body or mind does flawlessly without your conscious direction — and what would it look like to trust that same quality in a part of your life you're currently trying to white-knuckle control?
2. Pick the Station — Where are you assuming you need to be "in charge" of something that's actually already running fine on its own?
3. Love Wins — If the whole system runs well with very little control from you, what would it look like to loosen your grip on just one thing today?

This lines up with the Taoist idea of wu wei — the natural world moving through effortless, uncontrolled action — and with the more modern, secular concept of emergent self-organization: complex systems that run coherently without any central controller directing them.

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I love you. I mean it, genuinely, when I say it — but I got thinking about how loaded those three words have become. Why is it that we can't just say them freely, to anyone, about anything? Could you say "I love you" to a tree and mean it? To your house, your keys, a stranger? For most of us, no — and there's this unspoken training we've all absorbed that says the words are sacred, rationed, meant for a tiny circle of people, and using them outside that circle is weird or unsettling. I don't buy it. There isn't a good reason in the world why loving people, things, and stuff, and saying so out loud, should be strange. Saying "I love you" to someone doesn't mean you want to marry them and have their children. It just means you love them. That's the whole content of the statement.

So what is it, then, if it's not romance and it's not obligation? My best guess: God is love. Joy is love. Happiness is love. All of it, one thing wearing different names. I think of it like a power source — like electricity. It's the thing that fuels everything else, the current running underneath all of it. When you love something, what you're really doing is recognizing it for what it is and accepting it — and that recognition, that acceptance, that gratitude, is the love. So when someone in your life brings you joy, you love them. Full stop. It doesn't have to escalate into anything else. And if you believe, like I do, that everything is one thing, that we're all connected underneath the appearance of separateness, then loving everything isn't some radical stretch — it's just seeing what's already true. Anything that looks separate from you, anything "out there," is the world of symbols, the ego's world, the world built on duality. Your inside world is where unity actually lives, where God actually lives.

There's a kind of quiet war going on between those two — the ego mind trying to convince you that you're separate, and the part of you that already knows you're not. You're not going to win that war outright, but you can get better at recognizing it for what it is: when an external idea comes crashing into your calm, you can just say, I see what you're trying to do, I understand it, and I'm not buying it today. Love, in this frame, isn't something small or explainable in a sentence — it's a symbol standing in for something too big for language, which is exactly why people like me keep trying to talk about it anyway, hoping the attempt itself points someone else toward their own understanding of it.

It's strange to me that we live in a world that seems almost programmed to make people afraid to say "I love you" out loud — not just because it might be misunderstood, but because somewhere along the way we decided loving too many things, too openly, makes you the odd one. I'd rather be the odd one. I love you. Have a great day.

Questions to sit with

1. Stop the Signal — What's the old training that stops you from saying "I love you" more freely than you do? Where did you learn that rule?
2. Pick the Station — Is there something or someone "outside" you right now that you've decided doesn't count as separate — a moment where the wall between you and it felt thin?
3. Love Wins — If love is a power source rather than a rationed resource, what changes about how freely you're willing to spend it today?

This lesson touches the line from 1 John — "God is love" — treated here not as doctrine but as a description of love as the animating current beneath everything else.

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Here's the piece I didn't have when I first wrote my books — judgment only works inside a dualistic setup. To judge something you need at least two things: the thing and something to judge it against. Which means if you don't buy into a dualistic world, you literally can't judge, because there's nothing to measure against.

That's why heaven-as-a-perfect-place-where-everyone's-happy-forever doesn't actually work in a dualistic framework. You can't be in perpetual bliss if you believe non-blissfulness can exist somewhere else — you'll eventually circle back to it, the same way endless torture eventually has to become tolerable if you know pleasure exists too.

One of the monks got asked what it's like not having sex, and he said something like, why would I need sex if I'm living a perpetual orgasm? That's bliss without dualism — boiling water. Adding more hot water to boiling water doesn't do anything. And look, it doesn't even matter what heaven turns out to be. If it's a giant dodgeball competition all day — that's dodgeball, baby. Sometimes you get hit in the face, sometimes you don't. You don't have to score it good game, bad game. It was a game. Let's play again.

Questions to sit with

1. Stop the Signal — Next time you catch yourself mid-judgment, can you actually stop and ask "why am I judging this" before you finish the thought?
2. Pick the Station — What's your version of dodgeball — the ordinary thing you could just play, instead of scoring as a good day or a bad one?
3. Set the Tone — If bliss is just room temperature — no ups, no downs — what would you have to stop rating today to feel it?

The claim that duality itself is the real obstacle — not any one judgment — shows up in Advaita Vedanta's teaching on non-duality, and in the Taoist image of yin and yang arising from, and returning to, a single undivided Tao.

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I love you — and it's easy to say, because I mean it, even to someone I've never met and know nothing about. That's the thing about love: it isn't contingent on anything. It's not something you touch or see or verify. For me, love equals joy equals God. Say it enough different ways and you start to see they're all names for the same thing. And I don't think love is part of the illusion the way the body is, the way the physical world is. Love isn't something you experience through your skin suit. It's underneath all of that, or maybe above it, holding the whole thing up.

I got thinking about this after reading something about power — about how people assume power exists to destroy, that the more power you have, the easier it is to crush an enemy. But true power, power as a thing in itself, can't destroy, because a thing can only do what it actually is. If power is strength, then strength can't manufacture weakness, because strength doesn't contain weakness as one of its ingredients. You can't have a "powerful weakness" — the phrase doesn't even make sense. This is the same trick the ego mind pulls on you constantly: it builds these tidy little contradictions and then convinces you they're normal, so you stop questioning them. And it does exactly the same thing with love. Love can't do anything but love. There's no such thing as bad love. If you get your heart broken, it wasn't love that broke it — love doesn't have that in it. Love heals broken hearts. It doesn't manufacture them. Why would you want strength if all it did was generate weakness around it? Why would you want love if all it did was generate heartbreak? It wouldn't be love anymore if it did that — it'd be something else wearing love's name.

This ties into something I've been chewing on about Jesus, too — how the church took a man who told people, plainly, that God lives inside you and you don't owe anyone a single penny to access that, and turned it into an institution that demanded payment, obedience, and fear in exchange for a connection you already had for free. They built statues and symbols and settled on an appearance for him after a lot of debate, and somewhere in there the actual teaching — God's inside of you, go find it, it costs nothing — got buried under the apparatus built to control people. The stories about battling gods and blame and fear of hell are stories. They're meant to represent something, and if you interpret them through the ego's lens, you land on fear. If you interpret them from love's side, you land somewhere else entirely.

You can't take love from someone the way you'd take money — money you can grab, hoard, steal, and it's a construct anyway, not a permanent fixture of reality. Love has to be given to be received. You can't build a version of yourself that gets richer in love by taking it from other people; it doesn't work that way. Love only moves in one direction: outward, freely, without loss to the giver. That's not sentiment. That's just what the thing actually is, once you stop letting the ego mind convince you otherwise.

Questions to sit with

1. Listen — When you've felt heartbroken, what was actually doing the breaking — was it love itself, or something you attached to it (expectation, fear, control)?
2. Set the Tone — Where in your life are you trying to "take" love rather than give it freely and let it come back to you?
3. Pick the Station — What would it look like to trust that love, like true strength, simply cannot produce the harm you're afraid of?

This lesson echoes 1 Corinthians 13 — "love never fails" — not as a promise about outcomes, but as a claim about love's nature: it is not built with the capacity to destroy.

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