WHAT IS LOVE?

     Summers in college, I worked as a garbage man, and one day I was (stupidly) taking off my canvas gloves while standing in the blind spot in front of the truck with my back to it. A wee voice said, “Why don’t you step up on the curb?” Just as I did, the massive truck rolled where I’d been standing. Years later, it was a rainy night on the 405 Freeway. I was coming over the Camarillo Pass when the car just in front of me suddenly made a sharp turn into the concrete dividing wall, then swung out away from the wall, then came right at me. I hit the brakes and then the gas. It happened in a flash. I was a goner. Except, I wasn’t. It happened in slow motion, and I didn’t have an ounce of fear. The guy, thank God, got control of his car, and the cars that were all around us a moment earlier, all seemed to have vanished. There was the calm voice again.
     Flying into Houston, once, the plane hit a wind shear and dropped out of the sky. Everything went flying in the air. I’m going to die! I thought. Then, I heard a calm voice in me say, “So, this is what it’s like to die in a plane crash?” The pilot saved us. It was dusk outside the Marine base at Twenty-Nine Palms in November of 2005, I think. I was at a stop signal hanging from a wire. The light turned green. I was going to go straight ahead, but a wee voice said, “Why don’t you turn left?” I did—and a car rocketed by me at maybe a hundred miles an hour. Had I gone straight, I’d have been blown to smithereens.           
     So, there must be something in me that knows things I don’t and isn’t afraid of death, isn’t worried, isn’t panicked, and is preternaturally calm. It has saved my life, but so matter-of-factly, my life seems like a movie it’s watching from the comfort of somewhere else. What does it know that I don’t? What does it know that you don’t. Because everyone I’ve talked to has heard the voice. Who is this ME that looks out from me and looks out for me at all times? Nothing happens in slow motion to cars going sixty-five miles an hour on a freeway. Except, it all did. Immediately afterward, a question came to me from ME. It descended on me, filled me, and has stayed with me ever since, and is probably the only question ME would ever really want me to answer—“What is love?”   

Jon Pearson 11-16-2025