Are our ideas about love evolving right along with us? Yes, I believe they are. Today, in our seemingly chaotic world, beneath the surface of visible turmoil and divisiveness, there exists a gradual, almost imperceptible shift in the way we think about love. We are seeing an expansion from clannish familial love and romantic love based on physical appearance/attraction to a more inclusive universal love that encompasses all beings. In the past, this universal love has often been linked to the Divine love associated with a God or Goddess. In various spiritual or religious traditions, the Divine Mother is the primary image of unconditional, compassionate love. Historically, it has been difficult for ego-bound humans to express this kind of selfless loving. But all that is changing.

Now, during this time of accelerating evolution in human consciousness, we are opening our hearts to that infinite love without conditions or parameters. As we step into embodying the archetypal mother’s love for her child, we experience and radiate that love to all whom we meet on our life’s journey. The Divine within each of us mirrors the Divine in others: I love, you love, we love—the sacred circle of unconditional love. This is the love that is at the core of our being and at the center of the cosmos. In truth, both our universe and we were born in love. And we are finally awakening to that universal Divine love that permeates all things.

This February, the month in which people celebrate Valentine’s Day and romance, let us also recognize a love greater than cards or candy or our individual lives. A love that, if we let it, could redefine the way we live on this planet and make every day one filled with profound human connection and global harmony. Let us celebrate Love in the capitalized sense. Let us love the way Mother Teresa, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr. loved all peoples of the Earth. Let us love one another, and ourselves, with the delight and wonder a new parent feels when they look at their child. Let us, at long last, love from the depth of our souls, beyond limits and beyond words.

“To love another person is to see the face of God.”—Les Miserables