What is Love? The eternal question we all carry around deep within our heart. Love is the
eternal search. Love is eternal when we find it. But do we really ever find it ? When we
define it do we negate it? When we set limits on what we believe to be love do we begin to
destroy it by hoping to understand or own it for ourselves? We offer it through all of our
relationship we vary our giving, often by what we hope to receive in return. But is this
really love?
I recently overheard someone say in a conversation that there is no such thing as "
unconditional love ." I would have to agree, although for different reasons. Love within
itself is unconditional. Anything else is only an attempt to love, a learning to get us
nearer to the one true knowing of love. It may be honorable, well-intentioned, passionate
and desiring, courageous and pure. It may be felt as temporary, but if lost easily it may
not have been love at all. Love cannot be thwarted and often fall short of what we hope
love will be. This is where we learn we are human.
Love has been experienced as having a life of living poetry. Love has been experienced as
being the very notes of song, uplifting and generous to the wanting ear. Love has been
experienced as the final act of giving one's life for another in battle. Love has been
experienced as choosing to give new life to another. Love has been experienced as an
endless passionate over flow of emotion in the arms of waiting lover.
What do you do with the love granted to you each day? How many times do we deny its
expression for others because we fear what our own expressions will bring? Are we not
denying our creator every time we deny the expression of love?
Lost, empty, alone and searching. As individuals who have experienced separation or
divorce, or even the loss of a loved one to death, the separation can be the most
traumatic experience we live through. The heart-wrenching pain that seems to never
really go away, the enormous waves that hit us daily, the times we hit the wall right
after a strong and uplifting experience reminds us that we are learning. We are learning
about strength, passion for our own life, about our own sincerity in our beliefs, about
our loyalty to who we are, and certainly about our own genuineness. We search for that
day when love will come again. We search everywhere, everyday, almost every hour.
It has been said for centuries that " love is where the eyes meet with passion, for the
eyes cannot hide what the heart feels." So we have learned to look outward for this eternal
love that will fulfill us, forgetting that it must first fill our own hearts. Perhaps that
is why we fall into such pain and agony and sorrow when a love affair fails. It is at that
moment that we realize we did not fail the other person we expressed love to , but we have
somehow not fulfilled ourselves once again. We combat failure with a misunderstood
unfulfilled promise. We lose it, not knowing if we will ever find it again. The emotion
tides lift and fall ,crash and settle, then lift again.
No one else, no matter how much we talk or cry, can pull us through the anxious hours of
soul repair and growth. It is our own fire within that needs rekindling, guarding against
the winds that would blow it out and leave us dark, cold and helpless. It is at this time
that we find the lobe that binds us together with every other being that surrounds us on the
planet. Eventually we find the sun still rises to meet in the morning and the stars continue
to show us the way each night. The rivers still flow downstream into oceans that will never
turn them away. The trees still reach upward every day praising the God that made them. We
stand up straight and take a lesson from it all.
What if you woke up one morning and realized that you were the only person left on the face
of the earth? Who would you love? Why do we wait so long to start the journey that begins
in the same place that it ends？Love, in all its endlessness, unboundedness and failed
definitions is this experience.
Love doesn't ask why. It doesn't come. It doesn't go. It just is. It is not only in our
hands, it is our hands. It isn't only in our heart, it is what makes our heart beat every
beat. It wraps itself around us so securely that all we need to do to survive against all
odds is to recognize it as the very breath we just drew, and the last breath we just let go.