“Love consists in this: that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke
We are not the only ones who give of ourselves.
The earth gives. The trees give. The bees give.
A bee dies for its hive, but not blindly.
It dies because the hive lives.
Fruit falls not in sacrifice, but in cycle.
Roots send sugars through soil to sick neighbors—not for praise, but because the forest knows itself as one body.
There is a rhythm to this giving, a sacred economy of care.
Nature sacrifices, yes.
But it does not self-abandon.
The Hunger to Love
We carry in us a hunger to love—to care so fully we almost dissolve.
It’s in our bodies, our breath, our bones.
From the beginning, our wiring leans toward empathy,
toward pouring the cup, toward giving the last bite.
And that hunger is holy.
It is what ties us to our mothers, our lovers, our gods.
But when untended, it becomes a fire with no hearth.
We give without asking.
We give until we disappear.
We think: If I love well enough, I’ll be safe. If I love endlessly, I’ll be loved.
But love without boundaries is not devotion.
It is erosion.
The Blindness of Fear
And sometimes, we are not the ones who vanish.
We are the ones who overlook.
Our fears, our scripts, our unexamined myths whisper in our ears:
Don’t get too close. Don’t need too much. Stay in control.
We follow the ghosts of our heroes—the father who never cried, the mother who never asked, the lover who always walked away.
And in our quest to protect ourselves,
we fail to see the quiet offerings placed at our feet.
We miss the ways someone is softening for us, stretching for us,
loving us with a language we never learned to speak.
We take. We assume.
Not out of cruelty, but out of blindness.
What Nature Teaches Us About Giving
The natural world knows something we forget:
Giving must be rhythmic.
Love must be mutual.
Even the sun rests behind clouds.
“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart…”
— Rilke
The bee gives for the hive, and the hive holds the bee.
The roots feed the tree, and the tree shades the earth.
True sacrifice is not martyrdom.
It is partnership.
Self-Security vs. Codependency
Rilke didn’t write about lovers as two halves of a whole.
He wrote of lovers as two wholes—
two solitudes orbiting one another with grace and gravity.
To orbit is not to cling.
To orbit is to respect the distance that makes closeness meaningful.
“Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow…”
In this space, self-security becomes the soil for real intimacy.
I do not vanish for you.
You do not shrink for me.
We meet—freely, wholly, and again and again.
When Love Becomes a Mirror
But love is never just present—it is also past.
We do not enter love as blank slates.
We carry echoes:
the unspoken rules of our families,
the sacrifices we were taught to expect or to perform,
the fears we dressed as virtues.
Sometimes we call it love, when it is only familiarity.
Sometimes we follow a script that harms, because it once made us feel safe.
“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage.”
— Rilke
To love bravely is to unlearn.
To stand still long enough to ask: Is this love? Or is this survival?
To Be a Safe Place
Love is not about perfection.
It’s about presence.
To be a safe place for someone is not to erase ourselves.
It is to be honest, anchored, and listening.
It is to say:
You may bring your need here. I will not flee.
And I will bring mine. I will not pretend I have none.
Safety is not the absence of difficulty.
It is the presence of truth—spoken gently,
held with both hands.
Closing: Love, Like the Stars
In the end, we return to the stars.
Each one burning on its own,
yet made beautiful by the patterns they form together.
Love is not the melting of two selves.
It is the sacred recognition of another soul in full form,
and the choice to orbit—not to own, not to save,
but to witness, to touch, to greet.
“I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”
— Rilke
Two solitudes.
Two flames.
Two beings—each whole, each evolving—
choosing, again and again,
to draw near.
ChatGPT and Paul Tupciauskas
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