Love is a Verb

And the ways I've come to understand it as such.

It’s the last full day of my Europe trip. I’m sitting on a stairway to the water’s edge, a wooden pier stretching before me. I came here yesterday when the sun was high and crisp; today, I’m surrounded by pink and orange as the sun cracks open the sky behind Malmö’s skyline of skyscrapers.

I am cold. The wind is steady and relentless but not harsh, somehow, though my fingers struggle to type these sentences.

I left Oahu on August 20th with no idea what to expect. I booked it on July 30th, in the early morning hours, after being invited the day before. This year has marked yet another shift, a completed rotation within the spiral. Once again, I’m discovering more about myself than I realized there was to know. I guess that’s what flying halfway across the world with only 20 days of preparation does to someone.

Between the 4 am wake-ups to see the empty streets of Prague in the pre-dawn glow and the late nights skewed by jet lag, I made no time to write about what’s been steadily humming in my heart—this mantra, really—love is a verb.

Until today, as my fingers tighten and the water laps the metal stairs below me. Until today, as my body begins to finally call out for rest, my throat sore, and my eyes are bloodshot for the eighth day in a row.

Love is a verb; Love is active; it is ‘the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth … Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action.’

~ bell hooks, All About Love

The Verbs of Love

And what are these verbs? What are these choices?

They are the choice to hold, to care, to embrace, to support, to nurture, to engage, to uplift, to sacrifice, to emerge, to envelop, to encourage, to dream.

I’ve done myself such a disservice by treating love as only passing sensation, something that simply is rather than is created with thought, effort, and persistence.

I’ve learned to love myself deeply in the last several months, so I contemplate it now because I’m aware another door has opened within me, a new kind of access where love is reflex rather than repair, norm rather than exception, and a series of reorientations to source, joy, grace, compassion, and hope. It is where I am simultaneously the most tender and sturdy I’ve ever been, my most wildly free and thoughtfully contained; I am contained in the way I compose myself, my energy staying within.

How did I get here? How do we arrive at a new kind of love that steps sweetly beyond words of affirmation and external assurances? I dream of my center as a still pool of saltwater; here is where I find myself now, between the parallel shores of wonder and awe.

How I’ve arrived here is to recognize that love has always been a verb.

Sacred practice, ritual, brought out of the amorphous fluttering wings of passing thought into the now of the body, the now of being. Love is an uncountable collection of verbs that becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

My heart hungered for the verbs, yet I had no name for the hunger, so I shoved it aside. I didn’t understand that to feel love is not enough.

Love lives in the choices, not the wishes.

Love lives in the commitments rather than the promises.

Love lives in the steadiness, not the performance.

Love-Hungry

I was hungry for love as a little girl. I imagine you might have been, too, seeing love proclaimed in words yet undefined in behavior and relation, shouted from the rooftops without a sense of how to arrive there. Love seemed an ungraspable, abstracted magic, always over there, always metaphor.

So I learned to quell my aching hunger and tricked myself into satiety with beautiful poetry, where I thought love must live. I was determined to find nourishment in language when I needed something much more tangible and toothsome.

In the last few days, as I’ve floated along the cobblestone streets, sleep-deprived and bleary-eyed, to hunt for the sun’s glow between ancient church towers and rushing canals, and dived into the crystal cold waters along the Swedish coastline, my body aglow, and pedaled a borrowed bike through wandering garden paths, I practiced love as a verb.

Loving myself through my longings and for them, for my messiness and inconsistencies, my failures and dreams. I felt my breath go sharp and my skin bristle in the air with my celebration of being. Being someone and no one, being enough for myself in all her lack and gain and pleasure and desire.

I began writing this halfway around the world, added swirls of thought thirty-thousand miles in the sky, and I finish it sitting back home, the twelve-hour inversion of my circadian rhythm scattering stars beneath my eyelids each time I close them.

Love’s Metaphors

When my love was a noun, it was passive and demure, flickering in and out of focus. It was something to be pursued and known in the abstract, a hoped-for outcome, a soft melody.

Now that my love is a verb, it is steadfast, brazen, and unapologetically hungry, willing to take up space and ask for it.

My love as a verb is a thrumming baseline, substance, and substantial.

There is a split in my life. Before, it was composed of an uncountable number of moments when I chose to turn away from love, accepting it in name only, unwilling to fight for it. The after is composed of an uncountable number of moments when I diligently and determinedly turned toward love and acted in it.

Love is not a gentle lullaby, breakable and easily consumed by the world’s noise.

Yet love is the sound.

I realize I’ve said love must extend beyond metaphor, yet all I’ve offered is such.

Herein is the contradiction of love as practice, as grounded ritual.

Love as a verb is too many things to list here. It is all the small, meaningful, and grand ways we display care. My love as a verb is always a series of choices greater than the sum of its parts.

And in that sum, I find myself nourished, unlike anything I’ve known before.