The Barriers We Build Against Love

On rivers, fear, and the quiet work of letting love in

There’s a poem by Rumi, a 13th-century Persian mystic poet, that stayed with me long before I really understood it.

Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.

For most of my life, I believed worth had to be proven. Love, recognition, belonging, all of it felt like something that came after you had achieved enough.

So without realizing it, I built a life around becoming impressive, capable, exceptional. Someone no one could overlook.

From the outside, it looked like I was living a big, expansive life. I was traveling constantly, moving between continents and field sites, working with wild animals, building a career people called a dream. But underneath that movement was a quieter pattern I couldn’t see at the time.

I kept choosing romantic partners who weren’t really available. People who needed fixing, or saving, or understanding. Relationships that required effort, strategy, and endurance.

At the time, it felt like devotion. Looking back, it was something else.