What is LOVE?

"What is love?" I think it is more than merely passion flowing, more than just emotion’s gain, more than the sense of flesh on flesh. For one, it is an opening of the heart, so very hard to describe. It is compassion, yet it is self-interest too. It is giving, yet it is receiving. It is caring, yet it is letting go, saying yes and at times even saying no. It is to empathize, yet to realize another must learn to feel for themselves. Yet it is even more somehow.

Love is commitment, yet love is also a setting free. Love is inspiration, intuition, joy. Yet it is also heartbreak and loneliness and solitude. Love is the trembling excitation of newness, and the shaking of the grief of loss. Love is a slow and steady pace, yet too, it is the exuberance that makes us want to run and dance and sing. Love is ecstasy and misery, sureness and confusion. Love makes us feel as if we could do anything, yet love also makes us feel like nothing at all at times. Love is being light-headed and dizzy, yet love is feeling heavy and as if about to die. Love is the slow and steady heart, yet the flutter of its racing too. It is freedom, yet it can also be the bars of a prison found deep within, can it not?

Love is ageless and timeless and without dimension, yet love is here and now in this moment of forever. Love is ancient and new and ever-becoming. Love is what we always and ever and never can have, for love is dynamic. Love is the worth and the meaning and the quality of hope and hopelessness. Love is the glory of enlightenment and the darkness of unknowing.

Love is the sleeping and the dreaming and the waking. Love is real and yet invisible, felt and yet the deepest mystery. Love is existence and its annihilation. Love is the question and the answer ever changing. Love is what we want to do and have to do and refuse to do. Love is pain and comfort too, the illness of disease and also it’s healing. Love is the beauty of perfection, yet the difference of disfiguration.

Love is the height and the depth and the width, yet love is immeasurable. Love is darkness, love is light. Love is emptiness and fullness, the yin and yang - forever and always distinct yet flowing within and through and with each other. Love is the yearning for life and the illusion of death. Love is continuance in time and time’s obliteration. Love is its own beginning and ending and becoming.

Love is wanting and needing to gather them in your arms to comfort them, but not being able to; knowing that any touch, even the most loving, will only bring them more pain. Love is standing back and allowing them what they need the most, even if their need is to die, to move on, to let go. Love is carrying the great burden of having been helpless to save them. Love is letting the wounds heal, that someday they might heal cleanly, leaving only loving memories instead of scars. Love is allowing them to lie in bed when they are too weak to get up; lifting them into a wheelchair when only their eyes are left to speak to you to tell you what it is they really want; then rolling them back and forth through their house because you know that, even in such a state, their eyes still really do work and need more than just one ceiling to stare at, day in and day out. Love is letting go - to let go the hope of their medications when they are no longer able to swallow them. Love is signing the DNR so that the doctors can no longer just prolong their misery.

Love is sad and love is sweet. Love is tender memories. Love is one last kiss on the forehead of the beloved before the coffin is closed. One more touch of a hand now grown cold. Love knows that every moment, every year, and every tear have really mattered beyond any hint of dissension. Love is forgiving them for having been human and having to leave first. Love is treasuring the good times that lie hiding in your memories.

Love leads beyond obsession or possession. Love sees the light inside forevermore. No matter the darkness controlling their limbs or their minds. Love stands up and takes a beating in their place without complaint. Love burns us up inside, thus allowing us to start over - again and then again.

Love is a star in darkness growing - a great illumination of the soul. Love claims our hearts and won’t let go again, no matter what infraction some cold society might try to blame and shame us with. Love is knowing when to walk away, and knowing when to stay. Love is empathy so deep that we must feel each pain, each joy, and each great distraction that the other feels, in sync. Love is an insanity that never ends, the craziness to take a risk, the despair of the most lost and lonely moments of our being. Love is intuiting the fact that silence can be the most honest statement of all, instead of choosing to use it as a weapon. Love is holding in the letting go while letting go control. Love is a peak when the entire world senses harmony and peace drawn from the chaos of the universe. Ever expanding until it breaks down yet again.

Love is living through the pain they left behind. Blindly absorbing it until its form and substance have a chance to really change. Love is letting your mind drift over the embellished moments of agony that must come, soon or late, of any real relationship. Love is saying, "Yes, it hurts. It hurts so much," while clinging to the truth that this too, will surely pass. Love is the frenzy and the arguments, but most of all the making peace again.

-adopted-