“You can’t touch love, but you can feel the sweetness that it pours into everything” -Annie Sullivan

For a long time I believed love happened in the giving and receiving of affection, attentive listening, and showing up. It was in the exchanges where I knew that love was circulating in my life. I never knew that the love that came in was actually sitting in me steeping and changing me just because it was in me.

Maybe for a long time, I was not a worthy container of love. As soon as it came in, the cracks in my self esteem and the doubts that trailed the love would let it leak away. It took me a long time to realize that love given or received is a substance that actually stays in you and sticks to you in drops with each kindness and loving touch.

Victor Hugo once wrote, “Life is the flower for which love is the honey.” When I think of containing the love in my life these days, I imagine it like filling myself with honey. I spend time in my meditations checking all the old cracks and imagining strong beautiful chalices inside me, to hold onto the sweetness of all the little exchanges that make the days special.

I believe it is true that as Goethe said , “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.” But I also think that the more we focus on how love that comes to us actually ferments in us and changes how we see and feel about ourselves. Thinking about the loving acts in life as a way to accumulate goodness in ourselves is how we touch love even when we are by ourselves.