What it Means to Love

I'm reading Kathleen Dean Moore's book titled The Pine Island Paradox. She made a list of what is means to love a person and place. This list struck I cord with me and I wanted to quote her for all of you:

"What does it mean to love a person? What does it mean to love a place? Before long, I discovered I had made two copies of the same list. To love -- a person and a place -- means at least this: One. To want to be near it, physically. Number two. To want to know everything about it -- its story, its moods, what is looks like by moonlight. Number three. To rejoice in the fact of it. Number four. To fear its loss, and grieve for is injuries. Five. To protect it -- fiercely, mindlessly, futilely, and maybe tragically, but to be helpless to do otherwise. Six. To be transformed in its presence -- lifted, lighter on your feet, transparent, open to everything beautiful and new. Number seven. To want to be joined with it, taken in by it, lost in it. Number eight. To want the best for it. Number nine. Deperately.

Love is an anchor line, a rope on a pulley, a taut fly line, a spruce root, a route on a map, a father teaching his daughter to tie a bowline knot, eelgrass bent to the tide, and all of these -- complicated, changing web of relationships, taken together. It's not a choice, or a dream, or a romantic novel. It's a fact: an empirical fact about our biological existence. We are born into relationships with people and with places. We are born with the ability to create new relationships and tend to them. And we are born with a powerful longing for these relations. That complex connectedness nourishes and shapes us and gives us joy and purpose.

I knew there was something important missing from my list, but I was struggling to put it into words. Loving isn't just a state of being, it's a way of acting in the world. Love isn't a sort of bliss, it's a kind of work, sometimes hard, spirit-testing work. To love a person is to accept the responsibility to act lovingly toward him, to make his needs my own needs. To love a place is to care for it, to keep it healthy, to attend to its needs as if they were my own, because they are my own. Responsibility grows from love. It is the natural shape of caring.

Number ten, I wrote in my notebook. To love a person or a place is accept moral responsibility for its well-being."