You can love someone even when the person doesn’t love you, or doesn’t love you any longer or love you enough. You can love. Of course, loving someone doesn’t mean hounding or stalking. Loving someone may mean leaving him or her alone even when you want to be together. You can love someone and let him go his way and you go yours. Boundaries are not the governance of love.

This is the case with your children, is it not? You are constantly with your baby. As the child grows, you are with him less. He is off somewhere. He may even move far away. Your love is intact, only it isn’t full time any longer. Your child is ever your child, and yet he belongs more to himself now than he belongs to you. It is not farewell. It is the child’s leave-taking, however. He has miles to go. And you have to wave goodbye with a smile.

Sometimes friends seem to be at a distance even in the same room. So be it. You can love someone enough to grant him freedom even in the same room. You can love and free at the same time. You must.

Love is not meant to be a hold you have on someone. Love is not a vise. Let’s call it a key. You can unlock the door of love. You can give the one you love his key back. Truly he has the key to his own heart. His heart was not yours to hold. His heart was yours to behold and to shine your love upon.

There are no laws that say what love must look like and how it must perform. You may set such rules for yourself but not for others. You don’t like someone else laying down the law for you. What has to be, beloveds, is what is. You have to allow everyone his own free-wheeling space. You take no captives.

You see the sun every day, and you let the sun do what suns do. You don’t tell the sun that it has to stay where it is and keep shining through your window. You look up at the night stars, and you let them be. You don’t lock the stars in. You don’t demand. You love, and you let them go. In Reality, there is no near and there is no far. Closeness does not mean tied. The sun and stars and the moon are always in your heart. They are an intimate part of you, and they belong to themselves, and they belong everywhere they are.

You do not say that the beautiful sun, moon, and stars stray. They have their own paths, and they travel them. You would not control them. Your eyes may not be able to follow them everywhere. Consider everyone you love as his or her own planet, and each has his own revolving to do. In the case of people, you would say their own evolving to do. It is great love to let someone take the oars of his own life. You cannot hold against him that he goes somewhere where you cannot follow.

It is not for you to throw someone out of your heart because he goes in a direction different from yours. Who can say it is right or wrong the direction someone else goes in? If you love, you bless. You don’t resent. If you love, you don’t own. You have your freedom to love and to free a beloved one at the same time. Your love need not be dependent upon concession. Concede your own love, and take no prisoners.