Like most others, I would like to feel beloved. Better yet, I would like to feel part of a beloved community. It could be debated whether this results from an act of bestowing the feeling of being beloved on someone else or receiving it from another. The experience of feeling beloved may be neither giving or taking but instead is both.
It is a great gift to be able to feel secure and stable when being alone. It is an even greater gift to embrace the ambiguity and uncertainty of existence. That is the moment I most feel beloved.
Feeling beloved is, I think, unique to human experience. In the midst of the deep uncertainty we share with other sentient beings, I have the capacity to acknowledge and experience my relationship with the rest of existence. I can know and experience the convergence of causes that determine how I am beloved and have every reason to be grateful.
Humans have this unique ability to give this as a gift to one another: to declare and acknowledge that each of us is beloved. It is especially a gift to the degree that it is freely given.
There is something almost perverse about the human conventions that seek to provide a safe refuge where we might feel beloved. Humans surround themselves with assurances and conventions that would guarantee, affirm that we are beloved. We are burdened with conventions developed over ages that seek to be safety vests, life preservers, that will support the experience of being beloved. They mostly don’t deliver.
Like existence itself, being a beloved is ambiguous. uncertain and beyond the guarantee of time. It is what I choose.