What If Love Is the Force That Moves Everything?
On alignment, endings, the strange intelligence of nature, and why unconditional love may be something we remember rather than something we find
Yayoi Kusama,
Stars in the Night , 2014
“In the beginning was the Word.”
“All things were made by him.”
“Without him was not any thing made.”
— John 1
There are moments when the external world seems to mirror something happening inside us.
I don’t think the universe necessarily rearranges itself around our individual lives, but occasionally we look outward and recognise, in nature, a language for something we have been unable to articulate ourselves.
Today feels like one of those moments.
Above us, planets appear to gather. Light is obscured. Stars fall through darkness.
Alignment. Eclipse. Meteor shower.
Convergence. Obscuration. Illumination.
And I find myself thinking about love.
Not romantic love alone, but love as something much larger: an organising force, a form of recognition, perhaps even an energy that transforms whatever it passes through.
I have spent much of my life thinking love was something we found in another person.
I am beginning to wonder whether love is something we remember within ourselves.
Love Is Transformative Energy
Love is not merely passion.
It is not solely physical.
At its deepest, love is recognition beyond circumstance. Reliability. Interlacing. Two complementary forces strengthening one another and putting something positive back into the world.
Like wind entering a turbine and becoming energy.
Love is transformative energy.
But there is a paradox here that took me a long time to understand.
We are taught to search for someone who will complete us, and then we call the resulting dependency love. We imagine that being chosen validates our existence. We measure the depth of connection by permanence.
Yet perhaps one of the greatest transformations happens when we learn to love ourselves enough that another person no longer needs to complete us.
Then love becomes something different.
It becomes an encounter between two whole human beings.
Sometimes those people walk together for decades.
Sometimes they don’t.
There are people whose paths we cannot carry all the way through. Sometimes we encounter one another deeply and still arrive at a crossing one person is not ready to make.
That does not make the journey meaningless.
It means the journey has changed direction.
There is something profoundly liberating about understanding this.
Not every meaningful relationship must become permanent to have been real.
Not every ending invalidates what came before it.
Some people accompany us into another version of ourselves.
And then the path divides.
Perhaps Alignment Is Not About Forever
Love, I think, is a journey.
One that keeps moving.
Like time.
Like tides.
Like the moon.
Perhaps soul alignment is not about finding somebody who will remain perfectly aligned with you forever.
Perhaps it is simply meeting another human being at the precise evolutionary moment when you are capable of recognising one another.
There is beauty in that idea because it removes possession from love.
You can recognise someone without owning them.
You can love someone without requiring them to fulfil every role in your life.
You can be transformed by an encounter without demanding that the encounter last forever.
And perhaps the greatest soul alignment is ultimately the one that happens inside yourself:
when the person you were, the person you are and the person you are becoming finally stop fighting each other.
When you no longer negotiate with a reality that feels too small for you.
When you stop asking whether somebody else will choose you.
When you choose your own life.
This is where I find myself now.
I want to experience the layers, smells and complexity of everything around me. I want the universe of possibilities I once surrendered to predictability.
I want the life I repeatedly tried to reimagine so that it could fit somebody else’s framing of it.
I no longer want to suppress the very thing that makes me unique.
Because love should not make life smaller.
Love moves life upwards, sideways, forwards, Love expands. Love reveals.
The Sky Above Us
And then I look upwards.
There is something extraordinary about the fact that human beings have been doing this for thousands of years.
Looking at the sky.
Trying to understand ourselves.
Today, three celestial phenomena offer an unusually beautiful metaphor: planetary alignment, an eclipse and a meteor shower.
Scientifically, these are movements of matter, gravity, light and perspective.
They do not need supernatural explanations to be astonishing.
But symbolically, their sequence is difficult to ignore:
Alignment.
Obscuration.
Illumination.
A planetary alignment speaks to convergence. Bodies travelling according to entirely different rhythms appear, from where we stand, to gather into one pattern.
Perhaps there is something reassuring in that.
Things can belong to a greater order even when we cannot yet perceive how they connect.
Then comes the eclipse, the temporary disappearance of light.
Eclipses have unsettled human beings throughout history because they interrupt something we assume to be permanent. Day becomes darkness. The familiar disappears.
Yet the fundamental truth of an eclipse is extraordinarily simple:
the light was never extinguished.
It was only hidden from view.
Followed by the meteor shower.
Against darkness, matter becomes incandescent.
Something falling becomes light.
Something disappearing becomes beautiful.
Put them together and nature tells an extraordinary story:
The planets gather.
The familiar light disappears.
The darkness fills with unexpected light.
We Are Not Separate From Nature
I don’t need to believe these events were arranged specifically for us to find meaning in them.
Nature does not need to be supernatural to be sacred.
The extraordinary thing is that the universe we look towards is not fundamentally separate from us.
The elements within our bodies were forged through cosmic processes long before any of us existed.
And the same physical world we observe above us continues here.
It pulses through our blood and arteries and through the astonishing architecture of the human body.
It moves through rivers towards oceans.
Through wind across trees and mountains.
Through tides and storms.
Through seasons.
Through planets orbiting stars.
We are not spectators standing outside creation.
We belong to it.
And perhaps that is why certain moments in nature can affect us so deeply.
They remind us of scale, interrupt the illusion that the small world constructed around our fears, ambitions, possessions and identities is the whole world.
For a moment, something opens.
And we remember.
So Where Is Unconditional Love?
Perhaps we have been looking for it in the wrong place.
We search for unconditional love in another human being.
We want someone to choose us without hesitation.
To understand everything.
To stay.
To reassure us that we are worthy.
To fill whatever space inside ourselves remains unresolved.
But human beings are conditional creatures.
We carry wounds, desires, histories, fears and limitations. We misunderstand one another. We change. We sometimes hurt the people we love. We sometimes love people whose paths can no longer continue beside ours.
If unconditional love exists, then perhaps its deepest source cannot depend entirely upon another person’s capacity to provide it.
Perhaps it begins somewhere beneath the ego.
Before status.
Before achievement.
Before rejection.
Before we learned that love was something we needed to earn, there was once a child inside every one of us who entered this world without understanding any of those things.
Curious.
Vulnerable.
Alive.
Full of light.
Maybe spiritual life is partly the journey back towards that essence, not backwards into innocence, but forwards into recognition.
The Light We Cannot See
The infinite light in which all things exist is a thread connecting humanity at its deepest level: essence.
We live in duality.
Light and darkness.
Love and fear.
Creation and destruction.
Spirit and matter.
Beginning and ending.
There will inevitably be moments when we cannot see the light, and we will never touch it at all palpable physical way.
But I have come to believe something important:
Not being able to touch the light does not mean we cannot perceive it.
Perhaps the promise of God exists within us before we are born into this world.
Not something bestowed upon the successful, the enlightened or the morally perfect.
Something already there, waiting to be remembered.
And perhaps it ignites when we understand that unconditional love exists beyond the demands of ego: beyond possession, beyond control, beyond our desperate need to be chosen.
Love does not require us to disappear into another human being.
Love returns us to ourselves.
And from there, we decide what happens to the energy that passes through us.
Pain can become cruelty.
Or understanding.
Loss can become bitterness.
Or wisdom.
Fear can become control.
Or courage.
Love can become possession.
Or freedom.
That choice is where our will enters the equation, perhaps this is how invisible light becomes visible.
Through us.
A Blessing for Whoever Needs It
So, whoever you are, and wherever you are in your journey:
May you remember the child you were before the world told you who you needed to become.
May you recognise the light within yourself when you cannot find it anywhere else.
May you have the courage to touch that light even when you cannot see it.
May you love others without possessing them.
May you allow those whose paths diverge from yours to continue their journey without believing that what you shared was therefore meaningless.
May you choose yourself without closing your heart to others.
May you recognise something of yourself in rivers and oceans, in wind moving through trees, in mountains, in the moon crossing the sun and in stars burning briefly through darkness.
May you remember that you are not separate from creation.
You are within it.
And it is within you.
Every time you transform what you have received into something kinder, more truthful, more compassionate or more beautiful, you allow that ancient light to travel a little further through the world.
Love expands.
Love reveals.
Love transforms.
And perhaps, in the end, unconditional love is not something we spend our lives searching for.
Perhaps it is something we remember how to become.
A return to essence.
A return to one another.
A return to the infinite light from which all things came.
And a return, finally, to the light that makes us one with the Father. 🤍💡