I believe that the way this question is framed is fundamentally incorrect. More precisely, for many people, this is indeed the case: when they want to know what love is, for them it’s primarily about – what does it mean when someone “shows” it to you: says they love you, gives you attention, cares for you, desires you, gives gifts, makes love to you with corresponding moods – depending on what love means to them.
So very often, when I say “I want to know what love is,” nobody understands me and just sympathetically nods their head.
That is, of course, I’d be lying if I said I’m not interested at all in knowing what I would feel if someone desired me (if I myself would be desired in this sense), saying that they love me, caring for me, looking at me adoringly, giving gifts, making breakfast, well, and all the other stuff. But all of this is not about love. These can all be different forms of expressions of different emotions, which often accompany love, but essentially, it’s not about love.
More precisely, all of this is about someone else’s other emotions.
I’ve experienced all of these things on this list, much of what’s listed, of course, is pleasant, some flattering, some things are even indifferent, even when it seems like the person is close, and sometimes, things are even unpleasant and burdensome. Especially, if the “conditions” (like, for him to “do the same”) aren’t met.
But love, it’s something unconditional. It’s pure and beautiful – it will never burden anyone. Burdens come from demands, intrusion into personal space – physical or not necessarily, possessive statements, and basically everything that comes from someone else’s “I want” – it’s just often this “want” is packaged as “love,” but it’s not the same thing at all.
For me, “knowing what love is,” the process of understanding love – consists, as it were, of two parts: creation and experience. And this process is very much like building a house. No, perhaps more like growing not just one tree, but a whole garden: because love is a living substance: it’s born, it lives, it grows, and it dies. Or it continues to live if those who birth and nurture it never stop caring about it.
And in this amazing process – the understanding of love – of course, the most beautiful thing is its birth. It’s such a pure, light-filled moment that comes from the very heart of the universe, passing through our hearts. The birth of love is the most beautiful thing in the world. It’s the discovery of two hearts to each other. It’s the purest creativity, it’s infinite, unconditional trust, it’s transparent inspiration, creative flight, and magic.
Love always begins like this, for everyone. It’s just sometimes it’s very quickly displaced by that very “want,” and it continues to live under the reign of this “want.” It also often happens that one person in the couple is more or less aware, and they suppress their “want” for the sake of “love”: then they say that “one loves, and the other allows themselves to be loved.” But when two people are both aware to a certain extent and roughly to the same extent towards each other, and realize that “want” shouldn’t take precedence, at least it shouldn’t overshadow “love,” then they are capable of together building something amazing and magical, even more magical than the very beginning of love.
And the most amazing thing is that they understand that this process is endless. You can’t start building and then at some point stop and say, “we built it.” That’s why I compared love to a garden. It’s such a living space, with many living “objects”: tenderness, loyalty, trust, strength, resilience, self-sacrifice – a lot of things, in general. And all these trees will grow and develop – not all evenly, not all smoothly. There will be bugs, and locusts, and droughts, and frost, and invasions of aborigines, and hurricanes. There will also be the sun, and warmth, and summer, but not always.
And these two processes: the creation, the development of a little barely conceived love into something very big and beautiful, and the constant work on it, on this garden: nurturing all the trees, taking care to ensure that no troubles kill this garden, enjoying all its fruits. And this process is joint, constant, pleasant, but difficult.
And also, I see it’s not just a process. It’s not just working on relationships. Two people who don’t love each other are capable of simply from the desire and decision to be together, building solid relationships, roughly analogous to what I described above.
I believe that love is a special space, it’s almost an independent energy unit, which is alive between two loving hearts. It’s an informational field, which can also be alive, or it can die. It’s sustained by trust and awareness between two hearts open to each other.
And that’s what I want to understand. That’s how I want to know love.
I want to experience the process of creating love, to see with my heart all these little trees and grow them into a huge garden. I want to live in this garden and enjoy its magical fruits and polish my soul so that this garden can live: become better, kinder, more attentive, cleaner, trust more, want less for myself…
And I also want to feel this energy field, to be in it, and make sure that my heart is clean and open enough for this space between us to always be just as clean and open for both of us.
No responses yet