I remember little of that year, other than that I barely survived it,  and it gives me the chills and fever just to think of it. I remember sitting broken in the office of a therapist, and I was 61 then, and so no light at the end of the dark tunnel that seemed to be my life then, and the therapist, hoping perhaps to steer me in a better direction,  asked me what it was I most wanted for the rest of my life. The answer came quickly and easily.

“I want to find love,” I said, “but I don’t think I know what love is. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it.” And the tears came just as easily as my answer. The therapist nodded, he said it was clear that this is why I had come to my farm, moved to upstate New York. I was looking for love.

There is no one definition of love, but I think I have some sense now of what it is, as I do see it, every single day. Being loved and accepted is a sometimes jarring experience for me, Maria says I sometimes look at her strangely, as if to say “what are you doing here?” I tell her that that is not precisely what I am thinking, when I get that strange and cloudy look I am most often thinking “who are you? How do you happen to be in my life, someone who loves me this way?”

I think the beginning of love is to permit the people we love to be themselves, completely and perfectly, and to never twist them to fit our own image, or to force them to change in our image. I first encountered this idea reading the writings of Thomas Merton up in my cabin when I first ran to the mountain.

If we do not let those we love be perfectly themselves, wrote Merton, then we love not the person, only the reflection of ourselves that we find in them. Maria and I accept one another fully, if I sometimes look at her in shock it is because I still can’t quite believe that she exists, or that she lets me be so perfectly myself.

Acceptance, like encouragement, is the nourishment of love. I believe that many people believe they have to right to ask others to change, to twist and badger and push them into changing in their own image. Love is acceptance in the purest and fullest terms, I hope Maria never looks in the mirror and sees  only the reflection of me that she finds there. I want her to love herself as much as she loves me, because only then can we love one another completely and perfectly.