Living Love is a meditation on love not as an idea, but as a living force.

Love is living.
Love is giving.
Love is being.

And like the rainforest, love contains everything: shadow and light, abundance and decay, birth, death and resurrection.

This painting emerged from the extraordinary Panamanian jungle surrounding the chapel where I work. Looking upward through the canopy, I am continually reminded that nothing in nature remains still. Leaves unfurl and fall. Flowers bloom and disappear. Old growth returns to the earth and nourishes what comes next. Darkness gathers beneath the trees while, somewhere above, light is always searching for a way through.

The jungle has become one of my greatest teachers.

It does not resist the cycles of life. It simply lives them.

In Living Love, emerald and luminous greens surge upward through passages of deep shadow. Gold catches and releases the light. Fleeting blues suggest sky beyond the canopy, while marks overlap, disappear and emerge again. The painting feels alive because nothing exists in isolation. Every gesture depends upon what surrounds it.

Perhaps love is like this too.

We sometimes imagine love only as tenderness, happiness or beauty. But a fully lived love encompasses far more. It asks us to remain open through beginnings and endings, joy and sorrow, giving and receiving, holding on and letting go.

There is something almost sacred in this endless cycle.

Birth.
Death.
Resurrection.

The rainforest demonstrates it everywhere. What appears to be an ending becomes nourishment. What falls makes room for something new. What disappears changes form and continues.

Painting in a chapel surrounded by this abundance has changed the way I think about what it means to live well. Beauty is not static. Beauty is alive. It is happening now—in sunlight moving across leaves, in rain falling through the canopy, in a flower opening for perhaps only a day.

And perhaps that is the invitation of Living Love.

Not to postpone life.

Not to wait until everything is resolved, perfect or certain before allowing ourselves to experience joy.

But to understand that love is living our best life while we are alive.

To notice beauty.
To give generously.
To create.
To forgive.
To laugh.
To care for one another and for this extraordinary living planet.
To stand in the light when it appears—and to trust that darkness, too, belongs to the whole.

Living Love is my celebration of that great, mysterious pulse of existence.

To be alive is a gift.
To love while we are alive is the privilege.
And to live with love may be the most beautiful thing we leave behind.