Loving Places, Loving People

A year ago this coming Sunday, Jff and I got married. My favorite part of the entire day was the ceremony because it was something we had really made completely our own. We wrote the vows, chose the readings, decided the order of the ceremony, chose the music (and our beautiful singer, LLC) and John's aunt was our pastor. The following reading was, for me, the most meaningful part of what we had in the ceremony:

Loving Places, Loving People

Kathleen Dean Moore, The Pine Island Paradox

I stretched my back and started two lists. What does it mean to love a person? What does it mean to love a place? Before long, I had discovered I had made two copies of the same list. To love- a person and a place-means at least this:
One. To want to be near it, physically.
Number Two. To want to know everything about it- its story, its moods, what it looks like by moonlight.
Number Three. To rejoice in the fact of it.
Number Four. To fear its loss, and grieve for its injuries.
Five. To protect it- fiercely, mindlessly, futilely, and maybe tragically, but to be helpless to do otherwise.
Six. To be transformed in its presence- lifted, lighter on your feet, transparent, open to everything beautiful and new.
Number seven. To wan to be joined with it, taken in by it, lost in it.
Number eight, To want the best for it.
Number nine, Desperately.

Love is an anchor line, a rope on a pulley, a taut fly line, a spruce root, a route on a map, a father teaching his daughter to tie a bowline knot, eelgrass bent to the tide, and all of these- a complicated, changing web of relationships, taken together. It is not a choice, or a dream, or a romantic novel. It's a fact: an empirical fact about our biological existance. We are born into relationships with people and with places. We are born with the ability to create new relationships and tend to them. And we are born with a powerful longing for these relations. That complex connectedness nourishes and shapes us and gives us joy and purpose.

I knew there was something important missing from my list, but I was struggling to put it into words. Loving isn't just a state of being, it's a way of acting in the world. Loving isn't a sort of bliss, it's a kind of work, sometimes hard, spirit-testing work. To love a person is to accept the responsibility to act lovingly toward him, to make his needs my own needs. To love a place is to care for it, to keep it healthy, to attend to its needs as if they were my own, because they are my own. Responsibility grows from love. It is the natural shape of caring.

Number ten, I wrote in my notebook. To love a person or a place is to accept moral responsibility for its well-being.