Tiny Moments of Falling in Love

I may just be feeling sentimental after attending my brother’s wedding this weekend or beginning to feel a touch of autumn in the mornings, but I can sense that love is in the air. I don’t just mean the love we envision between two lovers. When I begin to tap into the sentiments around the fall, for example, I lean more into the poetry and romance that I experience with all aspects of my life. The romantic partnership I feel with nature and the changing colors of the leaves is just as potent as the poetry I experience with the crisp air that fills my nostrils.

So what is this version of love I’m trying to point out? I believe it’s the experience of living in harmony with my surroundings. My day to day may not have grand gestures of romance but sprinkled in all around me are opportunities to experience love as a sense of harmony. The elusive yet ubiquitous concept of love may very well be what emerges when there is a harmony between two or more parts. The value lives in the space between entities and harmony is what allows that value to take on a quality of love.

The wedding, for example, is an obvious celebration of love between two people who have declared a lifetime of partnership. In a more subtle sense, the harmony that emerged from an endless list of moving parts was required in order to host the symbolic day. From venues, caterers, bands, and bartenders to family, friends, and guests the experience of love transcended the couple themselves and seeped into the larger picture.

How can we begin to experience love as harmony in our everyday lives? A wedding may have a couple at the heart of the matter, but what else becomes available as we embark on that celebration? These are our opportunities to practice. If we tune in enough to the harmony of moving parts all around us, we can discover what else might be offering us the experience of love. Romance, poetry, beauty — these are not reserved solely for the narrow scope of lovers. These are sentiments available to us in all moments as we tune our own instruments to the symphony of life happening all around us. “Love is in the air” can in fact be taken literally to mean there is love to be inhaled from the air that surrounds you right now. Harmonize with your surroundings and you may discover there is so much more love to savor.