Original Spontaneous Insight

Love is making something out of nothing. Creatio ex nihilo. Love makes, builds, creates connections where none are and a life together that has not yet been lived.

Upon no thing can anyone discover such a possibility. Only through nothing—where no differences stand between—does encompassing love make something that endures.

Revised and Expanded Reflection

There is the World and there is Life—always already underway, now-here, everywhen-everywhere. Within this ever-unfolding World, each life is thrown into a stream of existence that began long before us. Yet amidst the totality of all that is, something new can still emerge where nothing was before. Love, in its genesis, is this kind of emergence: a creative act that brings forth something out of nothing in the midst of everything. In the openness of two lives meeting, love conjures a new shared world ex nihilo, as if by grace.

The encounter between possibilities, utterly situated in a life-world, is regenerative. When two persons truly meet, each carries a horizon of possibilities; their meeting is not a collision but a fusion that generates a fresh possibility together. This encounter is grounded in the concrete reality of their world—their culture, history, place—yet it transcends those conditions as well. In that meeting of minds and hearts, something greater than either alone is born. A relationship takes form that did not exist before, regenerating the life-world around it with new meaning.

Encompassing love both embraces and escapes its own destiny as ordinary being—by this extraordinary nothing. Love is at once deeply ordinary—part of the human condition, a bond we recognize—and utterly extraordinary. It fulfills what life seems to move toward (connection, continuity) even as it breaks the expected order of things. From an empty space of no prior relation, love leaps into being, defying what was “supposed” to happen. In this sense, love both accepts its place in the natural course of life and exceeds that course by virtue of arising from nothing at all. This nothing is extraordinary: a gap or openness where creation can occur, a void that love uniquely knows how to fill.

All presuppositions and preconditions collapse. For an instant, there is nothing but THIS. And then, something elsewise: friendship, suddenly surrounded by the life-world, ready for discovery. In the pivotal moment of loving encounter, all the usual expectations, labels, and differences fall away. Two people stand present to one another with no barrier between – no thing separating them. In that blessed instant, nothing exists except the immediate reality of the encounter itself (nothing but THIS). Out of that suspension of all preconditions, time resumes and something appears where there had been nothing. Perhaps it is a nascent friendship or a deep union blooming—suddenly this new relation stands in the world, with context and character, inviting the lovers (and indeed others) to explore it. What was no-thing is now some-thing, ready to be lived and discovered within the whole of life.

This emergence of love is a paradoxical event. It creates order in life by introducing something new, yet it originates from outside the established order. In essence, encompassing love both embraces and escapes its own destiny as everything being in order—by this nothing being out-of-order. Love holds everything together in meaningful arrangement (a new “order” of life shared), even as it springs from a disruption of the ordinary flow—a nothing that is gloriously “out-of-order.” From what looks like emptiness or chaos, love draws a new cosmos of meaning. It is the power of making something out of nothing: the power by which an encompassing love endures, creatively, against all odds.