Love as a Verb

I no longer think of love as something we have;  not a possession, not a state we fall into and hope to dwell within forever. Love, as I am beginning to understand it, is something we do.

It is a dance. A process. An orientation of the self toward coherence rather than fragmentation.

For much of my life I thought of love as a feeling — warmth, longing, safety, devotion and desire.  But feelings are weather; they pass, they surge, they recede. If love were only a feeling, it would be building a house upon the clouds.

And yet people do build lives upon love. Families, communities, moral systems, entire philosophies grow from it. So love must be something more enduring than emotion.

I think now that love is an act of alignment.

It is what happens when the parts of us stop warring with one another — when the body is not treated as an inconvenience, when emotions are not exiled, when thought does not tyrannize feeling, when purpose does not overcome relationship, when spirit does not deny reality as it comes.

Love begins, perhaps, as internal diplomacy. When we learn to cooperate within ourselves, something remarkable happens: we become capable of cooperating with others, we learn to dance together instead of alone.

And this, too, feels like love — not fusion, not possession, not dependency, but a kind of systemic harmony between beings. Where love is enacted, energy once spent on defense becomes available for creation. Curiosity replaces fear. Care replaces control. Presence replaces performance.

Love, in this sense, is coherence in motion. It is, indeed, a verb.

It is the body being listened to. Emotion being allowed. Thought seeking truth without callousness. Relationships built on reciprocity rather than transaction or extraction. Spirit recognizing connection without fusion or overwhelm. Purpose expressed without self-betrayal. The whole dancing with itself.

Love is not perfection; it is not a single moment in time. Coherence does not mean stillness. Systems remain alive by adapting, negotiating, recalibrating. Love is ongoing work.

Sometimes gentle. Sometimes disciplined. Often imperfect. But always dancing on.

And perhaps this is why love feels sacred to so many people: because coherence — whether within a person, between people, or across a community — is what allows life to flourish.

Fragmentation exhausts us. Coherence restores us.

If this is true, then love is not merely romance, or affection, or even attachment. It is the fundamental practice of keeping systems — selves, relationships, communities — from tearing themselves apart. Making love, not war, we create the music of our lives.

And maybe that is enough reason to practice it.

Not obligation. Not moral performance. Simply the recognition that coherence is generative. Love is how coherence happens; coherence is the creator of love.