Love

I've been spending this week looking into my new nephew's giant navy blue eyes and welcoming him into the world. He's only a week old, and already I love this little boy so much. Not just because he's part my sister and part her boyfriend -- or part my mom and my dad and my grandparents -- but because he's his own brand new little person, unique from everyone who has been here before or will be here afterwards.

I told him yesterday that I couldn't love him more if he had come from my own body -- which is completely true. I could have dozens of my own children, hundreds of nieces and nephews and cousins, and my friends could have thousands of babies, and I would still find it easy to love each of them limitlessly. That's because love itself is limitless.

But love is also timeless -- a hard truth that I learned because of my mom's death. On the plane, I was re-reading one of my favorite books from my childhood -- A Wrinkle in Time -- and I was struck by that very concept. For those who know the plot of the book, you know the basics. But one of the characters says "[T]he things that are seen are temporal. But the things which are not seen are eternal." I've thought about that quote, and I'm sure that it can be interpreted in a thousand ways, with religious and philosophical and god-knows-what-other-kind-of overtones -- but to me, it means that love is infinite, plain and simple.