What is love?

Love, a genuinely impossible subject. Love, emotion, rationality, irrational behaviour, loss of control, free spirit, feeling complete. Dark cruel thoughts, bright romanticism and feeling lost in the overpowering glare of light. Love is such a multi-faceted emotion. It can drive you crazy just trying to figure out which love you’re feeling…let alone try and understand why another loves you. Let’s take a look.

There’s the love of the land, love of god, love of humanity, love of family, fraternity, love of an ideal, love of a partner, love of intimacy, love of physicality, plutonic love…I mean we could go on for ages here. There’s a lot of words, concepts and ideals that we attach love to…but what does it mean? What is love at the end of the day? Pure affection and adoration? Or a feeling of belief and support? Is it synonymous with freedom or slavery? I don’t think so, but it can give you a sense of freedom and completion while at the same time feeling chained and enslaved to its blind madness. Is love doing? Is it an action? Or could love simply be being, accepting and flowing?

Perhaps love is carnal. Perhaps it’s philosophical. At the end of the day – love is. It can’t be pinned down. As with every aspect of the human condition (oo that’s makes love sound like an incurable illness) love can only be generalized. It is too individual, too amorphous to be tied down to a tangible conceptualization. Haha wow, those two words don’t seem to go together do they? Maybe that’s love…a combination of opposites, a joining of things that shouldn’t be but must…

Love might be fear. A concept so fluid that we strive to control it, to nail it down and contain it. We have to define it. We’re in constant terror of love, afraid that the slightest jolt to our containment system by some careless other might destroy it and leave us scrambling to catch hold of it again. A delicate flower, so fragile we hold it hostage, locked away and hidden, sharing it rarely and with reservation.

Perhaps love is precious. It would make sense. We sell lust in love’s place, giving it a misnomer so we can avoid releasing the real thing.

Humanity pours love every moment, every day. It’s just how you look at it. A donation, a smile or a wink, a comforting hand in a time of need. An embrace when racked with sorrow and confusion… Humanity – the state of being human seems synonymous with love. You don’t show your humanity by being cruel, although many humans do cruel things. You show it through acts of love.

That must be it. To love is to be human; to be alive. Love is simple – it’s our humanity – our link with god and that inner space deep inside of us. It’s the good side of the energy of the universe expressing itself through us. Love is the necessary half, neither wholly positive or negative, that completes our humanity. For me, that is love.