Love Does Not Fit Into This World

We spend so much time managing relationships and improving ourselves in the hopes of making love "work" that we forget that what we are searching for is something larger than anything a single life could contain.

Even if you spend the rest of your days in the arms of your beloved, there will always be moments when, watching this person asleep, perhaps, you realize you are in the presence of something you will never get to the bottom of, something you can feel but never fully touch, something you desperately want both to grasp and let go, like children who catch fireflies just to throw them back into the sky where they shine.

And in these moments when you realize that love does not fit, you must learn not to panic or to blame anyone for the awkwardness you feel.

You must find a way, rather, to be grateful for the limitlessness of love, for the distance at which it stands, precisely so that it can guide us, for the way that love is forever, even though we are not.

From my book, The Magpie Art, 3

Odilon Redon, "Ophelia Among the Flowers" (1905)