I have been looking for love my whole life. I understood at some point that I didn’t have it and didn’t really even know what it was or what it looked like. It was my quest. I came to the mountain cabin looking for love when I wrote “Running To The Mountain” – I thought I was looking for a spiritual life and did not yet know they are the same thing,  and I bought Bedlam Farm in search of love. I acquired animals seeking love and gave all sorts of money to all sorts of people in the hope of finding – even buying – love. One day I stood with Rose by the big barn and I looked out at my big farm with all of its barns and pastures and paths and I saw that it was nothing without love, just some buildings and land. As magical as it is, it was a scorched desert to me, barren of life and meaning.

I came to see that the whole purpose of my anguish and restlessness was love, this was what I could not remember having. Dogs and donkeys are wonderful, but they were not the kind of love I was seeking, needing. They were not enough, never enough.I felt the life draining out of me, that I was losing the very breath in my lungs, the beating of my heart, the step in my walk.

And then, I gave up on love. It was too late, my time had passed, I was getting too old, it would never happen, and my heart shattered into a million pieces and the rest of me followed. And then one day I looked up and love was right across the street, can you believe it? All that time, all that searching. If I had written that, no one would have believed it, I wouldn’t have believed it. All the time it was right there, a stone’s throw, a shout from me. How curious is the world, how wonderful. I did find love, it wasn’t too late.

And what, I have been asked, does love look like?

It is a shining light. A summer’s breeze. The first drops of a cooling storm. The hiss of snowflakes falling. It looks like the other, not the self. It is not about me. It is the surrender of the self. About trust. The safest place. A voice in the night. A hand on  your heart.  Birdsong just before dawn. A place to cry. A self revealed. The crash of an ocean wave. The wind at your back. It is about acceptance. About honesty and sharing. About generosity of spirit. It comes when you are ready, appears when you are open to it. It is the point. In the Kabbalah, God surveys the world and he laments the hard and greedy and angry hearts of human beings. Don’t they know, he asks, that love is the point? Love is why it all endures?