Love's all around you, just reach out and feel it

The question of love has been contemplated for thousands of years. What is love, how does it show, what is it based on and why do we love? Personally, I always feel closest to love when something captures my full attention. When the world around me moves noisily, but that moment seems frozen, because there is only one thing that counts. Because then, nothing else is important. Because love permits one to embrace the moment.

And nowhere else have I experienced this as many times, and as strongly, as in China. In the China of the older generation. The traditional China of the town parks, a heavenly micro-cosmos far from the everyday chaos. On a late afternoon, around the time the sun wears her warm evening coat.

Two women in their autumn years perform a kind of dance. Their look is locked on the eyes of their partners, radiating a warm affection. Together they step right, then left. They gently hold one another's hands. So gently in fact that the audience, which is invisible to the dancers, cannot make out if they are even touching one another.