Love is the only antidote to death. It’s the only thing that comforts us when death visits. Love heals and grieves—these aid our restless heart.
But it’s so easy to turn off love and step away from it. Sometimes we avoid love because we don’t want to feel all of it. We can’t just pick the warm fuzzies. Love asks us to feel all it’s dimensions: the pain, grief, fear, and opportunity.
I think the opportunity, or possibility, that love brings to us can be the most difficult part. Juxtaposed to death, and freed of arrestful fear, love asks us make our own. And this blank canvas, with helter-skelter gone, feels like a vast oasis.
And the juxtaposition of this oasis against the freedom of love and the certainty of death dares to seed in us transformation. It wants us to step out across the threshold, but this feels like annihilation. Annihilation of the falsely maintained sense of self we had. The accrued choices and decisions we made to reinforce this old self.
We’re asked to step forward into a new room inside the cosmos and make anew with these fertile seeds. This means changing, altering the scope of our lives—reorienting towards love. Really though, reorienting towards death too. See, we couldn’t have love without death. We couldn’t be so moved by love if it weren’t for the totality, ultimate surrender death demands of us.
Love throws our hands up in the air and in a briefly stabilizing moment of serenity we feel the grief of the already passing present and precisely because of death we fall so in love with how this here, now feels. We finally appreciate the now because of death. Here we learn to embrace death—like we learned to embrace love. Death brings us contrast. In this contrast is where love is planted and touches us. Where we finally feel it’s brief solace just before death lumbers forward to reset things.