Following the Current of Love
Reflections on attention, devotion, and the inner life
March 31, 2026
Love flows as current through life, always present, offering more than is obvious. Alongside it, another current moves unseen, offering guidance and insight.
A growing awareness came to me while writing my previous essay series. As I wrote about intuition — the ways it spoke, murmured, and sometimes hid from me, and how I responded or hid from it — I began to notice something familiar in the way I felt about love. There is a difference in my relationship with the two. My relationship with intuition has always felt constant, and therefore comfortable. Love, although a warm and living centerpiece of my life, has felt more elusive, harder to capture.
Both intuition and love move through my life as steady, guiding currents — quiet forms of life themselves, subtly feeding and guiding me at all times. And both are what I listen to above all else. They feel similar: calm, expansive, and capable of carrying me beyond myself.
As I watched more closely, elements slowly revealed themselves. Nothing entirely new, yet a growing clarity emerged as I observed the parallels between intuition and love. I began to notice where I resist certain definitions of love. I refuse the idea that accepting love requires foregoing one’s purpose. Instead, I find myself holding tightly to both the strength and the softness of love — the warm airiness alongside the strength of spine and fire.
While they feel deeply aligned, intuition and love are not the same. I see how, if these two forces are separate, I sometimes separate myself from life — and in doing so, from both love and intuition. When I pull away rather than engage, what am I truly choosing? Perhaps the more accurate question is what I am not trusting: myself, or something — or someone — else.
And if love offers that same expansion of life, do I approach it as I do intuition? I see that I do not. I welcome intuition with open arms, yet I sometimes guard myself more closely with love. When did I learn to protect myself from love in ways I never do from intuition? I am so afraid it requires a sacrifice of purpose that I fail to pause and consider another possibility.
Perhaps intuition feels safer because it asks nothing of me but attention.
Love, as I have often seen it described, asks for surrender — and time I am reluctant to give. Somewhere along the way, I decided surrender meant losing myself.
I notice it in small moments — an unexpected hug from a new friend that I am slow to return, a neighbor offering closeness I only partially reciprocate. But what if love, like intuition, is not something that demands my disappearance? What if it is simply another current of life asking to be trusted?
Perhaps it does not ask me to give anything away, but to receive something I have not yet fully understood. Perhaps love does not oppose purpose at all; perhaps it strengthens clarity. Perhaps love has never asked me to abandon myself. Perhaps it has only asked me to stand more fully inside who I am.
Perhaps love, like intuition, is not something to solve or define. Perhaps it is simply something to listen to.Â
If intuition is a current guiding me inward, perhaps love is another current asking me to step more fully into life — both carrying me beyond myself.
And like intuition, love may simply be waiting for my willingness to trust it.
This essay is part of the Attention series, exploring the currents that move through our lives:
Following the Current of Love — March 31, 2026
Exploring the Currents of Friendship — April 7, 2026
Encountering the Currents of Recognition — April 14, 2026
