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“Gamble every thing for love, if you’re a real human being,” wrote Rumi. “Half-heartedness doesn’t attain into majesty.”
Eight centuries later, we go on spending our lives making an attempt to win one thing we don’t absolutely perceive however are consistently defining, and we go on betting on all of the fallacious issues: We mistake admiration, visibility, and the trimmings of success for love, we mistake being highly effective for being cherished, we mistake needing for loving.
True maturity is essentially a matter of unlearning all these confusions acquired in the midst of costuming ourselves with maturity. So it’s that solely the very younger and the very previous appear to recollect the fundamental reality about love — love not as a bargaining chip however because the dwelling prize, each weak and wildly tenacious, radiant with Iris Murdoch’s timeless definition of it as “the extraordinarily tough realisation that one thing aside from oneself is actual.”
That gladsome, reality-broadening understanding comes abloom on the pages of What Is Love? (public library) by creator Mac Barnett and artist Carson Ellis — a poetic fashionable fable reimagining with unusual tenderness and originality the oldest quest narrative: that historical hero’s journey of discovery and homecoming.
A younger boy, craving to know what love is, asks his gardner-grandmother.
In a gesture that’s itself the deepest answer to the riddle of life and love, she enfolds him in an embrace and tells him that she doesn’t have a solution — however that he would possibly discover it if he goes out into the world. That is Barnett’s delicate summation of what it means to be human — we lengthy for love, we lengthy to grasp how the world works, and spend our lives foraging for understanding as we make our uncharted method by the wilderness of being.
And so the boy goes, assembly every kind of individuals with every kind of solutions — a dwelling reminder that there are infinitely many sorts of lovely lives, every with its personal understanding of magnificence and love.
The solutions he encounters bewilder him — every unusual and suspect if taken actually, every shimmering with the intimation of some bigger summary reality, every nearly absurdly explicit but shining a sidewise gleam on some spect of the common. Alongside the way in which, love emerges as a sculpture of understanding — the stone of all it’s not, carved away to disclose the essence that’s, a kind delicate but sturdy.
Love is a fish, says the fisherman.
It glimmers and splashes,
simply out of attain.
And the day that you simply catch it,
if you understand what you’re doing,
you give it a kiss
and throw it again within the sea.
When the boy grimaces and pronounces his disgust at fish, with their sliminess and their alien eyes, the fisherman sighs, “You don’t perceive,” and we’re immediately reminded that whereas the human creativeness started within the metaphor-machine of kids’s minds, metaphors are, in poet Jane Hirshfield’s beautiful phrase, “handles on the door of what we are able to know and of what we are able to think about” — and, generally, we should first know to think about.
And so the boy strikes by the world, gathering information of its variousness and of the touching methods during which its creatures go about foraging love. “Love is applause,” the actor tells him. Love is a seed the farmer holds up. Love is the evening to the cat.
Love, barks the canine over its shoulder whereas chasing the cat, is this.
On goes the boy, assembly folks clutching and carrying their loves: a chessboard, a tree, a bear, the Moon.
Love is a home, says the carpenter, along with her bandaged thumbs and her competent contented smile, talking actually about the home of life.
You hammer and noticed,
and organize all of the planks.
It wobbles and creaks,
and also you alter your plans.
However ultimately, the factor stands.
And you reside in it.
Final comes the poet, resembling a cross between Rumi and god, filling an infinite scroll together with his bid for the reply.
Because the lengthy poem of life unspools into the setting solar, we abruptly see the boy-pilgrim grown — now a younger man, making his method again to the little home the place his gardener-grandmother is now a really previous lady, nonetheless tending to her sunflowers.
She requested me,
“Did you reply your query?”I picked her up in my arms.
I smiled.I stated,
Sure.
Couple What Is Love? — a high quality time-shifted addition to the yr’s loveliest youngsters’s books — with poet David Whyte’s lyrical reflection on the measure of real love, then revisit a kindred celebration of the world’s variousness in Carson Ellis’s illustrated meditation on the numerous issues “dwelling” can imply and her painted veneration of time.
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