Talking about love and being about love are two vastly different levels of understanding and embodiment, for the simple fact that love can never be adequately contained in or expressed by language. Love is contained in action, in loving-action, and to attempt to capture love in language only is to immobilize it, to freeze it, to stunt it; to talk and talk and talk about love without practicing it is to not know anything about love at all – to not love at all.
A week or two ago, one of my favorite professors briefly told us about a Zen Buddhist. I forgot their name when I speak about this quote, but I can speak the quote almost word for word, for the quote is simple and has easily become one of my favorites to recite.
“A finger pointing at the moon” – i.e., when I point toward the moon, you aren’t meant to look at my finger. You are meant to look toward the moon! No matter how long you stare at the finger, you will never see the moon, and you will never understand anything about it!
So this is what talk about love should be like – it should direct us toward love; it is not love in and of itself, and we should never mistake it as such, we should never stop at it, and we should never be satisfied by our ability to talk about it – we must turn toward the moon; toward love itself.
