The movie camera is on the ground to find a different point of view (POV in filmmaking.) POV, of course, affects your perception.

   In her biography of scientist Barbara McClintock, Evelyn Fox Keller awakens a profound point of view on Love. She writes of McClintock that she "practiced the highest form of love, which is intimacy that does not annihilate difference."

   In your desire to become one with someone or something you love I wonder if you have ever sought to "annihilate difference." When you found that some impermeable wall remained were you confounded by a sense of deepend isolation?

   Keller suggests you think otherwise. True intimacy between you and another honors both deep sharing and an exquisite appreciation of the membrane that separates you from the other.  

   Only when you understand this experience as sacred can you honor what Parker Palmer calls the "otherness of things." To live this intimacy is the most precious experience you can have. When that holiness has entered your life your heart opens to the expression of Radical Loving Care in all of your relationships.

   What I mean by "all of your relationships" is reflected in the basis for McClintock's genius. The intimacy she lived in this example was not with her lover or her child or a friend.

   It was with a kernel of corn.

   To unlock the genetic secrets of the corn, she said that she somehow had to learn to "lean into the kernel." The kernel yielded its secrets to McClintock's love enabling her to become one of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century.

   If she could live such intimacy with a kernel of corn, can you live it with those you care for and care with across your life?

-Erie Chapman