Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius. 
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

In working, for my upcoming book Meditations on the Beauty and Mystery of Life, A Gratitude Journal, with the roughly two hundred quotes I’ve collected over the years on the subject of love, two conclusions emerge.

First, so much of the quality of a human life, the deep meaning, comes from finding something (or somethings) to love. It can be a work such as a creative work, another human being, a place – say a wilderness area, a dog, a cat. It can be all kinds of different things, but finding something or someone you can pour your heart into, your soul, your love, is where the deep experience of life hangs out.

Second, to do that, you need to build up your reservoir of love through your relationship with yourself. You can’t pour love into something or someone without having it to pour. That love comes from a deep sense of harmony with your own self, your inner world. It manifests in how you treat yourself, in how much emphasis you place on balance in your life, and clarity. It manifests in things like sleep, rest, meditation, exercise, time in nature, diet, exercise.

In the book, which is almost finished, I’ll offer my dozen or so favorite excerpts on the subject of love from Heron Dance interviews, books I’ve read and other sources (films, journals, interviews) but they all seem to come back to those two fundamentals: find something to pour your love into and, to accomplish that, build up your own internal reservoir by treating your life with love.