Love is what we do best

"Love is how we are together." That's the point of "Knowing What Love Is," my podcast for today. It's not something tangible or concrete, it's a relationship and how we behave.

Thinking about humans and our often troubled and guilt-ridden relationship with the natural world, the living communities that make this improbably green planet habitable, it seems to me that love may be our best talent as a species. And love may be just what we need to draw on to deal with the problems that we are inflicting on our only planet, from global warming to habitat destruction and our own species' overpopulation. If we can learn to live with open hearts, we might well find our everyday decisions have a lighter footprint on the planet. If we can learn to live with open hearts, we might well learn to share more equitably and give other species an equal chance at habitat, food, and the other resources we need for this life. If we can learn to live with open hearts, we might well even like each other better and be able to get along.

I started thinking about the gifts humans bring to the world in my book The San Luis Valley: Sand Dunes and Sandhill Cranes:

What we do best comes not from our heads but our hearts, from an ineffable impulse that resists logic and definitions and calculation: love. Love is what connects us to the rest of the living world, the divine urging from within that guides our best steps in the dance of life. Perhaps what allows a newcomer like me to belong . . . is the same gift that allows humanity to belong to this rare blue planet: an ability to love its miraculous as well as its mundane.

Love is about relationship, and how we behave -- with each other, and the community of the land.