Love
What is that….what does it mean…..how does it feel…..does it have a beginning and an ending, or is it just there?
I love my mom. I love my kids. I love my friends. I love my boot slippers with the fringe. I love our cabin. I love the first boy I ever kissed. I love raspberries. I love the sour cherries that ripen on the trees. These things all pull at me, they bring me flashes and smells and sounds of something that is or was bigger and better than me.
Is love the same with everything…is everything I love on an even basis? Of course not. I would be sad if I couldn’t have raspberries…but that would be nothing compared to the sadness I would feel at the death of my mom. But the basic heartwarming, easy breathing, happy laughter of love is there at each of these things. They are comfortable, they fit with me, they make me feel good. I appreciate them. And I love them whether I get anything back from them or not….I think. Just in loving though, I am repaid. Because I have them, I receive from them….all to varying degrees. They open me. They allow me to be vulnerable because I want them and need them. I can acknowledge my feelings for them, and take the risk that I don’t get the same things back in the same degree. But it is ok. For a love so great, a risk worth taking, because in taking the risk and allowing myself to be splayed open, I can love more.
Is the thing that mars love, my own reaction to my expectations of a return on that love? It is not the thing, because that will remain basically the same. Oh raspberries are sweeter sometimes than others, boots more comfy when my feet are cold, and people, those ever changing, rearranging people….have more time, have more patience, have more peace sometimes than at other times. But I will still love raspberries, even when they aren’t the best, and still love to see my slippers waiting for me at the foot of my bed, and will still love to see the people that make my heart smile, whether I’ve seen them last week, last year, or 20 years ago. They, themselves don’t make the love inside me change, because they are caught in a freeze frame in my heart. It is only my expectation of something from them, that will turn my emotions. So, loving what is, the way it is, without adding in my own emotional baggage, makes the feelings more pure and innocent. More heartwarming and true. More real and fulfilling for me.
Love is a memory, a feeling, a physical sensation. A pouring out of one’s heart, and a drinking in of another’s soul. Love is a match between atoms. An ancestral remembering, a scent that fills my eyes with scenes of deliciousness. A pounding of blood that is felt in my heart, beating faster, stronger and more magnificently than before. It is a pull in the pit of my stomach, a flutter in my veins. A life giving oxygen that spreads as completely as lava down the mountain. It is a wonderful, uplifting, heartrending, allowable, sensation.
The people and things we love, we need to hang onto them. The ones we don’t, we just need to let go.
So, love is the warmth that dwells and spreads inside me when I see a special friend,
it is a peace that settles over me, when the day is at an end.
It is the pleasant taste of cherries picked freshly from the tree,
it’s the love I have inside myself, the love I have for me.
