Can nature love?

Recently I remembered a sentence from Chiara Lubich saying

"the fact that God was beneath things meant that they weren’t as we see them; they were all linked to one another by love; all, so to speak, in love with one another. So if the brook flowed into the lake it was out of love. If the pine tree stood high next to another pine tree, it was out of love"

and thought... can Nature love?

We usually think Love as something exclusive to humans because it involves feeling, express feelings, a relation, but above all the consciousness of loving. Therefore, associating love with Nature seems like a romantic notion that feeds poems, paintings, novels but it doesn't happen in real life.

Maybe that depends on the notion of love. So I did something we usually do. Google it. My search was "what is love?"

I'll focus on the first result. In Psychology Today I found an article by Deborah Anapol PhD stating several of the most common ways of defining love. Among those, the first caughting my eye was "Love is a force of nature."

We characterize Love as a force. A force in science is a concept associated with imprinting dynamic to a system. Also Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest and paleontologist, spoke of love as one of the “most universal; the most tremendous and mysterious of cosmic forces”. Therefore, love imprints dynamic.

Later in Anapol's article, she says

"Love is bigger than you are. You can invite love, but you cannot dictate how, when, and where love expresses itself. You can choose to surrender to love, or not, but in the end love strikes like lightening, unpredictable and irrefutable. You can even find yourself loving people you don't like at all. Love does not come with conditions, stipulations, addenda, or codes. Like the sun, love radiates independently of our fears and desires.

Love is inherently free. It cannot be bought, sold, or traded. You cannot make someone love you,... Love cannot be imprisoned nor can it be legislated. Love is not a substance, not a commodity, nor even a marketable power source. Love has no territory, no border, no quantifiable mass or energy output."

Beautiful words. And, even if we cannot quantify love in terms of mass and energy, we accept Love as a force of nature. Odd.

I'm writing this post seated on a table in a country house surrounded by nature. I hear the song of birds, sense an ant crawling my leg, the buzz of a fly, feel the wind, the sunlight hitting the tree leaves, I see the shadows, and my daughter playing with a ball, constantly interrupting me because she invented a new volleyball game... isn't she sweet?

And I ask myself, what am I experiencing in all this? Love?

I'm experiencing that everything surrounding me is a gift. Birds are giving me their song, trees are giving me oxygen and beauty, the fly is giving me the nerves and the ant is giving me tickling. I'm giving a thought about all that's surrounding me.

I may sound ridiculous, but isn't love ridiculous?

I'm experiencing love as gift. Now I understand Chiara's thought. Everything that flows in nature is a gift to someone, or something, which is why it is "out of love".

What would the world be if everything we do is "out of love"? Can nature love? Yes. But can we love as nature does?