I WANNA KNOW WHAT LOVE IS
Book Review of Original Love: The Timeless Source of Wholeness by Thomas Rain Crowe for Smoky Mountain News, Waynesville, NC, Feb 5, 2026
“I wanna know what love is/I want you to show me.”
-Foreigner
There’s love and then there’s Love. In Glenn Aparicio Parry’s book Original Love: The Timeless Source of Wholeness (SelectBooks Inc., New York, 2026—also available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Indy bookstores), https://www.amazon.com/Original-Love-Timeless-Source-Wholeness/dp/1590795741, he gives us the full monty of what this means, as if looking at the Earth from outer space through enlightened eyes. We’re not just talking about romantic love, here, but how the love energy is pervasive and proactive both here and beyond. We get a good idea as to what Parry has to tell us, to teach us, from simply reading the Table of Contents and the way he has organized and implemented his subject matter. In all of these chapters, Parry takes us from the present and what’s possible, into the future and what is already there and has been since the beginning of The Beginning.
Parry spends a lot of time musing, almost biblically, about ancient and recent Indigenous peoples and how there was no distance between mankind and nature in a Nature that included the cosmos as well as the earth. He discusses this paradigm in the context of what is “original” in relation to “time,” saying: “Original, meaning arising from source. If something is original, it is timeless, both old and new, and both place and time” with “Love being a foundational force of the cosmos.” As many Indigenous peoples knew, it is all about “transcending the rational mind and returning to leading from the heart,” he writes in the early pages of the book. Then he adds a hint of what will come in later chapters: “Much of what we call Indigenous wisdom is also feminine wisdom,” which he says is now reemerging. All this, but in the end, he says, “It’s all about Love. The key to being loving is to be present and listen. Love is ultimately a vibration. It has more to do with being than doing. Love is as deep as the ocean and as boundless as the stars.” “In the deepest recesses of my heart,” he confesses, “there is a memory of how we humans came into existence and how we are radically interconnected with all living things as part of one interspecies family. We have been here all along, connected with and coemerging with all creatures across time. This is why all other beings are our relations. This is the most important lesson we can learn.”
Parry writes from a quasi-Indigenous perspective about how the Feminine is essential and part of our distant past: “A black hole at the center of the Milky Way is the womb of our galaxy—spoken of in many Indigenous stories as the place we came from.” Here, Parry uses the name “Mother Earth” to emphasize the feminine nature of the planet we live on. “All living things are the children of Mother Earth,” he writes. The Indigenous peoples across the globe had many creation stories, with versions that often state that “all life begins in darkness and grows toward the light.” Parry returns to this idea time and time again with different metaphors for different peoples around the world. Equating Love with light, he says that “love is a feeling of oneness with all there is.” “All of creation is a vast interdependent circle,” he continues, “this is why Native Americans refer to the circle of life as a Sacred Hoop.”
All this, above, is the basic framework upon which Parry uses to give us the more prescient details of how and why everything both seen and unseen works. It’s a kind of spiritual science that he is evoking for us in order for us to expand our rational mind to a place of heartfelt cosmic-consciousness—which he believes is possible with a little discipline and determination at a time in human and planetary history when it is needed most. He discusses this in the context of The Industrial Revolution and today’s AI technologies and how these have led us down “treacherous paths.” As we turn the final pages of Original Love, Parry leaves us with a kind of warning, stating: “The entire enterprise [of the accumulation of knowledge] is mistakenly called progress when it is only distance from the origin, distance from Love.” This is preceded by many telling quotes in the book by influential thinkers and writers such as Plato, William Blake, Meher Baba and Joseph Campbell, including poem fragments by advanced spiritual beings such as 13th century poet, Rumi, who reminds us of who and where we are.
In the end, what we have here is not purely academic science, not philosophy, not religious spirituality, but a history of one man’s visionary pursuit of the Truth based on a lifetime of questioning, studying and listening to answers given to him by sources of higher knowing. Sources that have many names that he elucidates in this text, but which are all names for the same Reality (that some might refer to as God) which proposes that everything is an interconnected part of and which, when functioning well, operates as One.
Thomas Rain Crowe, is an internationally-published and recognized author of more than thirty books, including the multi-award winning nonfiction nature memoir Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods and translations of the 15th century Sufi poet Kabir in Painting From the Palette of Love.
Feel free to order a signed edition of Original Love from me directly. https://glennaparicioparry.com/product/signed-edition-of-original-love/