Dear Universe,
I used to believe that all of the big, important questions didn’t really have an answer. I told this to a woman while we stood in a snowy wood overlooking a lake cozied between two mountains in February.
It wasn’t just any woman. She was the most honest and forthright person I had ever met. It was a quality I found very, very attractive. Of course, there had been the huge wild dark eyes, the curvy and strong figure, the warm and winsome smiles and the way her skin felt against my fingertips; it was the first time my fingers had discovered they could taste. There was the way I had felt sitting beside her, putting up my feet, and feeling truly at home for the first time in my life during that first night as we talked to the dawn.
It wasn’t just any wood beside just any lake. Here, we had come the Halloween before, just the two of us, and danced to some piping melody among the year’s ruins of leaves and bony branches.
It wasn’t just any February; it was the last February of the century. It was the February when I brought this young, wise, funny and mysteriously amazing woman back to Lake Willoughby to ask her a question. You see, I had discovered that the really big, most important questions did have an answer. You showed that to me, oh sweetest universe, by sending said big-eyed girl into my dreams and, again and again, through some mad coincidences, into my life. So, I did what any self-respecting young man might do.
I got down on my knees in the snow and asked a very important question.
I am still reeling from the answer. I suppose I will continue to reel until I spin off into the next life where I might (with any luck) get to ask (or be asked) such a question to (or by) such a spirit.
You see, I didn’t realize it at the time (at least not consciously), but as I had fallen in love with this woman, so then did I fall in love with you.
I have always been a philosopher. It is just how I have courted you, my cosmic benevolence. And in all my days and night spent thinking or talking over the mystery that is you, I realized an important fact.
We do things for a reason. We might (if living a life unexamined) be woefully unaware of why we do the things we do, but it doesn’t change the fact that we do each thing for another thing’s sake. This successive other thing is then, in turn, done for yet another thing’s sake. So on and so one, forever and ever, Amen (or Ah-women). The real question that remains then is: What thing is worth doing for it’s own sake?
Let’s face it. This is the question that has built empires and torn them down again. Some hairless monkeys, like the nefarious O’Brien from George Orwell’s 1984, believe that that thing is power. Some perhaps think that it is money, but what is money but the currency, or system which cradles power? Power, the babe that demands suffering for it’s existence and is born from fear.
Some would say that it is pleasure. I like pleasure, don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan. However, pleasure seems to me to be a condiment of life. I love a bit of ketchup on a hot dog, but I would not try subsisting from drinking the darn stuff. Would you?
No, the answer of this all important question was holding my hand on that cold February day, looking me in the eye and saying: “Yes! Yes! Yes!” (I told you I was still reeling)
The answer of course, is love. For love is not only the babe that is born of tenderness and lives off compassion, but it is the babe that is us. What baby can thrive, develop and turn his or her happy face to you, great universe, without being held and cared for, cherished and treasured? It is often said that we are what we eat, and what we most need, crave and relish is love. We drink it from the milk of our mother’s love, we eat the produce of the sun’s seed and the Earth’s womb. We are made from you, great universe, for you are love.
What could be nobler? What feels more right than this?
With greatest thanks for the multitude of questions that all lead here, to this, the most ultimate of answers:
because I love you,
Trav
T. L. Barrett 
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