Love
Recently some fellow humans and I were joking about the small rock I brought with me from Sweden. It would of course be more pragmatic to bring a knife or a plate with me rather than a stone, but my reason was that I could borrow a knife and a plate from a friend here in Finland but nothing could replace that particular piece of Sweden for me.
It's my most treasured thing-I-live-with, the only decoration I have in my office, and something I would take with me if I moved again. It's so valuable to me spiritually that it feels uncomfortable to call it a thing. It represents a beautiful place I felt connected with, and it allows me to connect with that place again. Apart from that, it's a natural and local object, I simply picked it by the water in Ångermanland in northern Sweden. We were discussing my love towards this object and that I am so committed to it that I should have a wedding ceremony and marry this rock. We were discussing my wedding outfit, contemplated how I could get it, who would be invited and who would perform various roles such as carrying the rock. It was a light-hearted moment of connecting with those fellow humans. While it may sound unserious and strange, it's not even the first time someone is assigning a typically human role to a non-human being, consider for example Arne Naess and him seeing a mountain as his father.
However, that made me think about love more generally. Love is actually part of a framework for a degrowth society that my colleague and I conceptualised. We didn't specifically refer to romantic love, but rather love towards the universe which includes the self, others (humans and non-humans), becoming, and the life force. In my life this feeling, since my childhood, has generally featured more prominently than love towards any particular individual. It feels like unconditional love which one experiences but also receives from existence, and more immediately from the planet and the sun, in the form of safety, security, comfort, and abundance. For this reason, separating from my partner was not too difficult, and watching a video of a rocket launched into the space feels like a horrific violation.