The Ever Expanding Nature of Love
We are each of us angels with one wing, and we can only fly embracing each other.
- Liciano de Crescenzo
Love of all levels comes naturally to very young children – they laugh, smile, fully express awe and wonder at the world around them. Kids will eagerly embrace any person who comes close enough, touching and grabbing in an exploratory way that reminds us what safe touch is like. When a child brushes your cheek gently (or not so gently), you tend to feel grace in that little moment.
Children love everything, and to them love is a never ending well of delight, always available, never conditional. They can love to different degrees people, pets, food, colors, etc. Love is not exclusive, limited, held back for something proper or better.
The most important thing in life is to learn how to give out love, and to let it come in.
- Morrie Schwartz
As adults, we lose this – the ability to love and touch different people. Love is reserved for family, for lovers, for spouses. Touch is discouraged in public. Love is limited by Hallmark Card defined days where expression is pre-packaged, and affection is something you express only in private.
We are losing our ability to love, to connect, to engage. Or are we?
Your heart is my piñata.
- Chuck Palahnuik
Sometimes, in order for any large group to change, critical mass must be reached, either in concord or in opposition to the issue at hand. And I truly believe we are at critical mass these days.
We have to thank people like George Bush for being so extremely corrupt and so wrong for the country, as it forced many apathetic voters off their butts. We must be grateful to the planet for alerting us to our own myopic machinations that are harming the environment. We must be grateful to the extremes, as they truly force a reaction. Extremes highlight what is out of balance and what is missing.
We embrace the drama of extremes in love because we feel the need for compensation – we are having too much joy, or we don’t feel sexy or loved enough, or we have issues that linger from long ago, putting a choke hold on love. For some, love isn’t real unless it hurts in some way. We are ever conflicted beings, us humans, full of longing and our own sense of self destruction.
Could we have love without the drama, the sting of all things man made – rejection, sexual politics, forced promises? Now that women are truly able to navigate their own sexuality and their reproduction, can now finally be the age in which we enjoy love and sex without the centuries of cultural baggage? I think so, and I try to live by that promise of our foremothers…to be all I can be, artistically, professionally, sexually – without apology or fear. I am the brazen culmination of my sisters in struggle.
We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.
- Tom Robbins
We, particularly women, cling to the hope of marriage. Why? It is never the answer but the beginning of questions. It is the long walk, often, to ourselves, as we start that walk leaning on the other. Isn’t it interesting to find the man we are leaning on needs to learn more about loving from us, being rather lost and confused by it? Are you, as a young woman, ready to be that support, that resource, that point of answer in someone else’s life? Isn’t that best saved for later in life, when you have figured out who you are and what you truly want? And when your potential partner has done a little living to figure out who he is?
And why hang on the notion that there is one perfect love out there? I think there are shades of love we can handle and partners for those shades. Is everyone able to be a royal purple deep love? Probably not…but I’m sure everyone can be a nice bright pink love, full of laughter and light, that speaks to friendship and affection.
We have to love like children, like Vikings, unafraid, limitless and ever-expanding. We need to stop holding on to the meagerness of limited love and learn to live in the comfort of universal love. To touch, to love, to engage, all these things should not require a long term commitment or promise. That is holding love hostage for something more. Why hold on to something that is meant in small amounts for you? Why pull and stretch it into something its not? We yank too hard on love, even brotherly love, thinking that love owes us something, belongs to us, makes us a promise in its presence and existence.
I like to liken love to collection of rain drops. If you only look for rain from one cloud, will you ever quench your parched land? Some rain is torrential, some lightly drizzling through sunbeams, some make rainbows, some make floods. But would you ever say one rainfall defined all rain for you, forever? Wouldn’t you in fact not remember the nature of every raindrop but remember instead the feeling of soothing and quenching of the entire rainfall? If your soul is parched, why wait for the “perfect” love to come along and feed you completely? Can it ever be all things to you, that one rain? The obvious answer is no. But we are afraid of that answer, afraid of having to seek out multiple sources of rain.
Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence
- Aristotle
In love, as you become more skilled, you will be able to create ever more rapidly and with more skill and assurance. Your ability to attract love, kindness, friendliness will grow, as you understand not to grasp at it, or hold on too tightly. When we contract into fear, into wanting too much or hoping too hard, we lose the happiness that the love we thought we found initially gave us.
As an emotional Viking, I have found I have a vulnerability and the centered assertiveness that comes from knowing my own heart, and acting on that knowledge. I recognize unnecessary longing, when someone makes me uncomfortable or emotionally rapt without good cause. I avoid dramatic scenes that pull me into a story often not about me at all. I’ve learned to take little personally, especially in dating, and keep an observant eye on all things. A cool distance, yet happy to jump in, once the water is clear.
I also recognize not everyone I meet on my path will understand or embrace me similarly. I’m not usual, predictable or easy to label. Men find me confusing, since I’m not looking for ring or a commitment. Someday, some really amazing man will dazzle me and convince me he’s the father of my future children and the co-pilot of my adventures. But until then, I enjoy dating and meeting and loving, in little ways. Will the affection end with marriage? Or will it change with children to focus affection on?
I don’t want to be near you for the thoughts we share but the words we never have to speak.
-Nikki Giovanni
Sleeping with a man, or a woman, is a little bit of love. Trusting someone with my body is loving them, is allowing them to partake of my soul and my being. That we still deny this – sex is all physical, no emotions involved – is silly. Loving is coming together, trusting and experiencing another soul, whether its for a few hours or an eternity. In my mind, to some degree, when I am having sex with one man, I am, in the universal sense, touching all men, who ever were and will ever be. The energy of my love, my sexuality, will not die in the moment of its birth, but carry on into eternity. Perhaps its the glow in the stars from a million miles away – those millenia of loving moments.
The most eloquent silence; that of two mouths meeting in a kiss.
When you kiss me, without uttering a single word, you speak to my soul.
When it comes to true love, we are all submissive. For in order to truly love we must submit of ourselves and them to us.
Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength; while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
- Lao Tz
Have courage, love wildly and free, but keep a hold on your heart. Never think that sharing love, in large or little ways, needs to be guarded and monitored. Love exists within you, as a muscle, and pumps out only what you allow it to. Grow that muscle, be unafraid to embrace and laugh and love. And when someone really touches your soul, you will know the value of all the love you’ve ever shared.
Peace and much love,
Melissa
