love is always knocking

it only enters with our consent

Dear friend. Dear one. Thank you for being here. So many of you have shared kind thoughts and prayers for my family this week. I’m so grateful, and I receive your love.

Which leads me to share a presence that keeps gently knocking at the door of my awareness—right when I need a tender interruption. There, at the threshold, is love. It waits for me with all its unfathomable persistence, infinitude, and omnipotence.

Do you know this presence?

And even as I move sluggishly to the door, it waits—quietly knocking and peering in with all the courtesy of a respectful but concerned neighbor. And there it is again, knocking one more time.

Just the knocking and the quiet call of my name is enough. Just that is love. A text, a message, a call—love. And it doesn’t stop at my door. The men working on the street—love. The driver setting down a package—love. Our neighbor’s young child, chasing her ribbon around a reddening tree—pure, powerful love. I’m grateful for these reminders.

This presence buttresses my tired body while it endures a confused but accepting heart. What use is a heart, it wonders, when another heart suddenly disappears? It heaves—a contraction. Then it remembers a universe populated by glistening hearts and expands. This is the use of the heart: contract–release, contract–release—we connect because it pulses.

And when it stops, the connection is a merger. No longer two but one.

Another gentle knock on the door.

That presence.

My friends, that presence is all we are. Your kind words. New friends in new places. My brother’s surprising death—what feels like a disappearance into the fog, even as the fog comforts me. And also my mother’s regrets. So much weeping. And my heart’s longing to help.

It’s all love.

Love knocks by grace, but enters by consent.

Our very existence is love; in every moment, we choose how we participate in it.

And how amazing, isn’t it, that our programming for this is so overridden by the distracting belief that love must appear perfectly sculpted to our sensibilities? We pick and choose from infinite love as arrogantly as we cherry-pick our truths. We rarely step back to contemplate the entirety of the whole.

The presence at the door, just as it is—waiting. Full of kindness and unfamiliarity, disappearance and chasing, clinging and rejection, longing and contentment. And here we are, unsteady as babies learning to stand, afraid of a fall, worried whether love will demand that we abandon safety.

Well, of course it does. Like every step we learn to take. And it will hurt us. We’ll carry wounds and then scars. We’ll share stories, then wisdom.

Still, love will gently knock. We’ll open ourselves only a little at a time, choosing this person or that, willing ourselves to love and be loved. And when we find a conspirator willing to love and be loved with us, we believe ourselves fortunate. We stand in awe of our discovery of a precious gold coin while the mother lode of love sighs a little at the door—and waits.

So, what if we look at these crafted notions we use to isolate and define varieties of love? Philosophers far smarter than I am have erected intellectual obstacle courses out of love’s pathways—engineered, maybe, to protect us from hurt, but leaving us dangling and stuck, time and again, wishing for love to enfold us. We classify the kingdom of love into phyla and classes: eros and agape, passionate and platonic, objective and subjective, familial and self. We even call the persistent love we refuse to receive “maniacal” or “obsessive,” simply because we don’t want to give it a place to settle. And we’re not wrong to step carefully—as we open to love, isn’t it beautiful that we also build our stamina to endure it?

In the kingdom of love, there are some lands we may not be ready to tread—that doesn’t make them enemy territory. It makes them the ground of unexplored love awaiting our understanding.

And, sure, it’s a holy risk.

The wholeness of love asks us to consider carefully the drawing of boundaries and rules. And yet, even Jesus—who demonstrated our sacred capacity for love’s hurt—also reminded us of our power to turn the cheek, to walk away, and to forgive seventy times seven. Buddha, too, welcomed his dear visitor Māra, the tempter, to tea—spending ample time with Māra’s invitations to greed, anger, laziness, and doubt, and choosing wise alternatives without refusing Māra’s presence. There was no hostility; only loving acceptance. These men chose to be explosed, not to be tortured.

Jesus forgave. Buddha opened the door. Everything could enter—even love that would hurt.

We can do that, too. Slowly, wisely, with awareness—these great ones show us a path, not a magic trick.

And what a relief, to recall that even as I stumble along the path, love waits for me—whole and unified, patient and abiding, eager but not anxious to be welcomed.

This is the presence I’m feeling these days. The whole of it. All of it.

It’s all we are. It’s our nature. Our choice is not whether we will or won’t love, but whether we’ll return to our nature… to be love.

Thank you, friends, for reminding me of this abiding presence.

Today, a simple contemplation:

• Imagine the fullness of love at your door.

• What do you allow to enter? What do you ask to wait? What do you send away?

• What would it be like to welcome infinite love into your heart?

• And if today you can only open the door a crack, what love arrives for you?

Thank you for being you.