A few months ago, on a retreat with spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen, he spoke for a while about love and trust. Love, he said, is vague—you can love ice cream, your dog, your spouse, and God, without really making any distinctions between them.

We also get sloppy with people we love, he said, and I recognized this to be true. Of course, there is something beautiful in feeling free to share our vulnerabilities, but too often this ease turns into taking each other for granted. In many cases, we end up being our worst selves with those who are closest to us, rationalizing that they will love us anyway, and that we deserve to be loved just the way we are.

But is that true? When our lives are expressions of selfishness, or when we lash out at our loved ones because we can, or when we live out of our lowest desires, is that behavior worthy of love? Maybe it isn’t. And, Cohen said, maybe trust is a better measure of our regard for each other than the amorphous concept of love.

Unlike love, which says, “You are perfect just as you are,” trust says, “I know that you are capable of incredible things, and I trust you to make the effort.” We might love despite or even because of our faults, but we trust in one another’s integrity, honesty, and willingness to keep trying. Trust can be earned, and it can be destroyed. It is conditional, and that is what makes it so precious. We may generically love everyone, but not everyone is worthy of trust. The question, then, is, are we trustworthy? Do the people who believe in us have good reason to continue to do so?

Since the retreat, I’ve thought a lot about this, and I realized that most of my relationships are built on the amorphous idea of love rather than trust. I love many people, but the number I trust is much lower. More importantly, I think about the people I am closest with and wonder—can they trust me? When I say I will do something, do they need to take my words with a grain of salt? Do I teach people to believe what I say, or to wait and see what happens? I am working to develop integrity, and to be more and more trustworthy every day, but I recognize that I still have a long way to go.

These thoughts about trust came back to me the other day, as I sat on a rock on a beach in Northern California. This is easily one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been—a half-circle of cliffs surrounding a small patch of golden sand, trees bending a hundred feet over cobalt blue waters that crash and dissolve into silvery specks in the sunshine. A waterfall trickles out of one of the cliffs, and lush yellow flowers seem to explode from its edges as the water runs over rocks and forms pools all the way down to the sea.

As I sat and let all this sink into me, I realized that nature can be trusted. Rivers will generally find their way to the ocean; life will almost always appear where sunlight meets water. Moreover, nature can be trusted to create beauty as it creates life systems. Nothing in this gorgeous landscape was planned; it came together through time and the consistent workings of simple forces—wind, rock, sand, sea. Seagulls don’t ride the wind just to make a beautiful picture for me to appreciate—they do it to get their supper—but the beauty is created nonetheless.

Throughout human history, we have endeavored to dominate nature, to control and manipulate it to our own ends. And, of course, we had to learn to do this: how could the great achievements of humankind—artistic, scientific, spiritual, political—have happened without some level of material security and comfort?

But in our attempts to dominate, we lost our sense of trust. We began to think of nature as an accessory to our ever-more-comfortable lifestyles rather than the foundation upon which we and everything we know are built. At this point, now that we can see the complexity and the consequences of the situation we’ve created, the question is, how do we regain that trust? And how do we locate a new, higher sense of trustworthiness within ourselves, so that we can fully participate in nature’s creative process?

I know it is there. I know it is there because the same forces that created the immeasurable beauty of the exploding flower waterfall also brought me to it, with the capacity to see and care for it. The inherent beauty of nature is the inherent beauty of me and of each of us. Only our ideas about who we are keep us from realizing this.

Can we lay down our suspicion, and work to build lives with nature rather in domination of it? Can we become as trustworthy as the water that will inevitably get to the sea? Can we trust that life is fundamentally good, and that the process ultimately works, even if we sometimes can’t see the big picture?

If we can, then maybe our lives can become expressions of both trust and love—a circle of care that goes wider and deeper than anything we can imagine right now. Maybe unconditional love is not about caring for a small number of people without condition, but rather about loving the entirety of the process we are part of without reservation.