The Quiet Yes: On the Nature of Mature Love

We speak often of falling in love—with people, with practices, with paths.
We rarely speak of staying in love.

Staying isn’t glamorous.
It doesn’t trend.
It doesn’t surge through the nervous system like a new affair with God or an ayahuasca high.

But staying is the deeper miracle.

When I write about falling in love with Reality, I don’t mean the early-stage intoxication of awakening. I don’t mean the bliss-storms of first contact with the Divine.

I mean what happens after.
After the thrill.
After the breakthrough.
After the part of you that needed fireworks has grown quiet enough to recognize the stars have been out all along.

I mean the kind of love that grows in the bones.
That puts roots down in the dailiness of life.
That learns to breathe with Reality, not just gasp in its presence.

My parents were married for seventy years — in love even longer.
Not because they “figured out” love, but because they lived it.
There was no performance in their affection, no need for grand declarations.

Just this subtle and unwavering devotion to the ordinary.
The way he looked at her when she sang.
The way she patted his hand when he was troubled.
A thousand quiet yeses whispered through decades.

This is what love looks like when it stops performing and starts being.
It doesn’t make a scene.
It becomes the scenery.

There’s a story Rupert Spira tells—a man hikes for hours with a 40-pound rucksack on his back. When he finally takes it off, he feels a rush of relief, even elation. But then, a few minutes later, he feels… ordinary.

The rapture of release fades. What’s left is simplicity. Wholeness.
Nothing special.

And that’s the whole point.

We’re not here to chase after exaltation.
We’re here to remember the holiness of what’s already here—once the striving drops away.

This is the Dharma as it lives in me now:
Not a teaching to transmit, but a life to inhabit.
Not a peak to reach, but a path to walk, over and over again, until even the walking becomes stillness.

Mature love—whether with a partner, a path, or the Kosmos itself—is not an event.
It’s a vow we keep making, silently, with every breath.

Not the vow to feel good.
Not the vow to be free of pain.
But the vow to stay.

To stay with this life, this breath, this version of ourselves—unglamorous, sacred, and unbearably real.

This is the Quiet Yes.

It doesn’t sing in major chords.
It hums in the background, like the sound of the earth spinning, unnoticed but never absent.

It is what remains when there’s no longer anything to prove.
When the one who seeks disappears into the one who lives.

It is the subtle fragrance of love that has stopped trying to smell like anything other than truth.
And it is the love I offer to the world now—not as an achievement, but as a Presence.

Always here.
Nothing special.
Holy beyond measure.