The Longer Line

The Longer Line

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Love: to hold something higher than your own need, to value the health and happiness of some one, or some thing, at a greater measurement than your own reward. Love, like a tree, can grow twisted and gnarled yet never ceases to be love. And like a tree, love is innocent of the damage it does to those bold enough to say they understand. Love is premeditated sacrifice, like milk, when it could be blood. I’m sure at some point it was, hungry clones clawing at the host, the only innocent cannibals. We fell in love with the little blood-thirsty animals. Love is not mysterious or magical, it is scientific, and it is natural. It manifests in families, and not just humans, but within all species. All creatures recognize the future, that the world is larger than any individual’s experience, why else would birds diligently feed their young who will never feed them in return? Why would the turtle dig the nest deeper than scratching the surface, what is convenient, to the right depth at the safe temperature and steady humidity. These turtles will never meet. 

Love knows that our true calling is to inhabit the earth, to care for it forever, not because it needs us, but that is the only way to beg for it in return. Our physical way of life is the only language the earth understands, the only prayer it can hear over the roar of space. Love is farming the world to its perfect design, it is shaping our anatomy alongside a multitude of other expressions, including the tree. Love has made us free. It was an act of love that allowed humans to release evil into the world, it was an act of trust. The only evil is us.  

But love has adopted and re-adopted humanity again and again, and because of this, we have been allowed to glimpse inside the house and see the future that’s coming, that love itself is shaping. And it has spoiled us and ruined nature, not with evil, worse. Too much love.

Love is looking at someone on a timeline, past, present and future, and then using all the capabilities of your being to gain an understanding of their past, and use everything you have in the present moment to sow the soil with acts of kindness and sacrifice that, weather permitting, will grow into future happiness for the person you love.

Love is looking at your species and your planet on a timeline, and using your power in the present moment to sustain, improve and extend that timeline into the unimaginably distant future. 

Love is a line of time like a winding thread that knits past, present, and future together.

Happiness, contentment, joy, comfort, peace, the longer line.