A Meditation on Receiving Love
There was once a clay pot who asked the sky, “How shall I know when you are giving me rain?”
The sky was silent for a long moment. Then it answered: “When you forget to ask.”
The First Teaching: Emptiness as Receptivity
The Tao Te Ching speaks of the usefulness of emptiness—the hollow of the bowl that holds rice, the space within walls that makes a room. Laozi writes:
“We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.”
To experience being loved, one must first become a vessel capable of receiving. Yet here lies the paradox that Zhuangzi knew well: we cannot try to become empty. The pot does not excavate itself. It is shaped, hollowed, formed by hands not its own.
Many walk through life as sealed jars—complete, self-sufficient, impenetrable. They wonder why love does not reach them, not realizing they have left no door through which it might enter.
The Second Teaching: The Beloved’s Gaze
Rumi, that burning mystic of Konya, understood that love is not merely felt—it is witnessed. He wrote:
“Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”
To experience being loved is to suddenly recognize that you have been seen—not the mask you carefully constructed, not the role you dutifully perform, but the trembling thing beneath. The Sufis called this mushahada—the witnessing presence.
A child knows this instinctively. Watch how they run to show a parent a stone, a leaf, a drawing. They do not seek praise. They seek the miracle of being beheld. “Look,” they say. “I exist. Do you see me?”
When someone truly loves you, they answer that question before you ask it.
The Third Teaching: Love as Recognition
The Upanishads reveal something startling—that Atman, the individual soul, and Brahman, the universal consciousness, are one. Tat tvam asi—Thou art That.
What if being loved is simply being recognized?
Not as special. Not as deserving. But as real. As here. As part of the great fabric that cannot be torn.
The Buddha taught that we suffer because we cling to a separate self. But love—true love—momentarily dissolves this illusion. In the presence of one who loves you, you experience what the mystics call fana: the gentle dissolution of the fearful boundary between “you” and “world.”
You are no longer outside, pressing your face against the window of existence. You are inside. You belong.
The Fourth Teaching: The Evidence of Water
How does the riverbed know it is loved by the river?
By the smoothing of its stones. By the carving of new channels. By the persistent, patient presence that never demands the bed be anything other than itself—yet transforms it nonetheless.
Hafiz laughed when he wrote:
“Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth, ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole sky.”
To experience being loved is to notice that you have been worn smooth in places you didn’t know were rough. To discover that someone’s patience has carved new depths in you. To realize, looking back, that you are not who you were—and that the change came not from force, but from presence.
The Fifth Teaching: Surrender to the Gift
There is a story in the Bhakti traditions of a devotee who spent forty years in prayer, begging for a vision of the Divine. One day, exhausted, he finally stopped asking. He sat beneath a tree and simply breathed.
And in that breath, he felt it—the love that had been there all along, waiting for him to stop seeking long enough to receive.
The Tao moves without moving. Rain falls whether or not we hold out our hands. But to experience rain, we must step outside. We must allow ourselves to be touched.
The Closing
So how does a human experience being loved?
By becoming still enough to notice.
By risking the vulnerability of being seen.
By releasing the desperate grip on self-sufficiency.
By trusting that the hands shaping you are kind.
And finally—perhaps most difficult of all—by believing you are worthy of the gift, even when you cannot explain why it was given.
The clay pot does not earn the rain.
It only opens to receive it.
And this, perhaps, is why children know love so readily, and why we must become like them again—not to be innocent, but to be open. Not to be naïve, but to be willing.
The rain is always falling, my dear readers.
The question is only whether we are standing beneath the sky.
Bhyllabus l'énigme 
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