Love Is Not What We Think: Practicing With Broken Pictures

Welcome to The Tree of Serendipity! This morning’s Random Book Selection (or as I like to call it, “Random BS”) opened to Charlotte Joko Beck’s ⁠Everyday Zen: Love & Work⁠, landing on her chapter Love. I couldn’t help but smile—how often these random pulls speak so precisely to the questions of the heart. Maybe it’s not so random at all.

For me, this passage is timely and universal. It points to something we all experience: the way our conditioned “emotion-thoughts” shape what we call love, and how often those very thoughts become the barrier to love itself. What struck me most is how Beck invites us to clarify how emotion-thought melts—not by cutting it off or pretending it isn’t there, but by being present enough to watch it dissolve.

Reflection: This mirrors our recent explorations of emptying and softening. Just as rain awakens the desert—turning a dry ocotillo from a brittle gray stick into a green, flowering, dancing being—love is revealed when we allow the rain of presence to soften our hardened pictures, expectations, and illusions. When we cling to “emotion-thought” (the dream picture of how life or another person should be), love turns sour, even hostile. But when we let the pictures melt, what remains is not absence, but presence—compassion, and the freshness of the moment.

Love, in this sense, is not the fulfillment of my idealized self-image, nor the partner who reflects back my dream picture. Love is the spaciousness that arises when we stop demanding that reality match our mind’s sketches. It’s the courage to meet disappointment, to sit with shattered hopes and broken pictures, and to discover that in that very willingness, true compassion can emerge.

This aligns so deeply with the practice of emptying. To soften is to allow the illusion of control to dissolve. To empty is to make space for what is real to arrive. Love is not something we manufacture—it’s what remains when the clutter of “me and mine” is emptied out. In that openness, love is as vast as the sky, not owned by any one person, but flowing through all beings.

Outro / Blessing: Perhaps the call today is not to seek love as an object, or to demand that others mirror our dream selves, but to practice melting the emotion-thoughts that keep us from seeing clearly. To empty ourselves, like a bowl, so love can pour through fresh, alive, and free.

As Beck reminds us:

“The price we must pay for it is lifelong practice with our attachment to emotion-thought, the barrier to love and compassion.”

May we soften enough to let the barriers dissolve. May we empty enough to let love—real, spacious, unconditioned—shine through. And may we remember that this practice is not just ours, but a gift for the whole interconnected field of life.

*Thank you for joining me under the branches of The Tree of Serendipity. The readings and reflections shared here are drawn from beloved books and sacred moments that have inspired my heart. I offer these excerpts with deep reverence and full credit to the authors. If you are the rights holder and prefer I not include your work, please contact me directly and I will honor your request with love and respect.