Love

Trying to define Love may be one of the most difficult challenges I've faced so far. Love is the subject of unknown numbers of books, papers, dialogs, television and radio programs, movies, and nearly any other media category. I see it plastered on billboards, in newspaper ads, thrown about in the classifieds, and inscribed upon bathroom stalls. Love is pervasive (at the very least as a word). I mentioned in one of my first posts that I would be making a future entry on Love, but I've been uninspired lately. A conversation I recently had with a dear friend was the catalyst.

As introduction: I Love Love. Why capitalize Love? The big "L" functions as a way to highlight Love's importance and give it a sort of personality, as if it were a living, thinking, dreaming creature sitting next to me. I imagine Love as overall androgynous, though a great deal of the time it comes into my mind as a woman. But the image is never clear. There aren't any boundaries, hard lines, or logical direction. Love appears in my dreams as if all of space around me were filled with color and light. It's like when I gaze into the night sky and a starry point of light becomes fuzzy only when I try to focus on it. In peripheral the image sharpens, but, because it's peripheral, I can't focus on it. Love is everywhere in my dreamscapes, in the minute spaces between my cells, encasing my body, always flowing, never smothering, visible, never containable, and, after that long string of descriptives, still as undefinable as ever. I am trying to express a paradox I feel about Love. I seek to put descriptive limits on Love, but, by my definition, there can be no limits. Love is unquantifiable and unmeasurable (by conventional means, compared to the wavelength of light or the stress on a steel bar). It has no units, no boundary conditions, no one-sentence definition (not even a 10,000,000 sentence version). No telling where it began or where it ends. Maybe I'm a nutter and you see it differently Dear Reader?

Love all, Love all. Love in your own way. For me, Loving is finding joy in their joy, pain in their pain, wholeness in their wholeness. Loving is devotion to individual choice. Loving means overthrowing all mental walls, criticisms, and assumptions to view them through a Lens of Love. I say a "Lens" to further stress the importance of relativism. Love is how you see it. I believe in no absolute definition of Love when considering fine details (good example of the Absolute/Relative paradox ... I'm all over the paradoxes today). Specific perceptions, scenarios, and experiences create a vast spectrum of Lenses. Yet, I think the absolute theme in Love is connection--relationship. I cannot conceive a circumstance where Love exists without connection of any kind, brief or long, intimate or distant. Maybe, you have examples Dear Reader?

What a lot of words. As far as I know, every human language has at least one word for it. Love is the ultimate one-way radio. It effects me, but I cannot change it, give it form, find the limits of its curves, the endpoints of its influence. I'm like a point charge so close to a surface it makes up my whole reality, my whole existence. Metaphors and Similes aside, Love is my world, both waking and sleeping. I am not always paying attention to this fact and exude un-Love. Yet, even when I feel consumed with anger, fear, and bitterness, I have always ascended from those lonely depths to see through my Love Lens again. I cannot say anything for indisputable truth (as is true for all of this post), but I deeply believe I belong with my Lens at every instant, waking or sleeping. I Love Love.