It's a funny thing, this thing called love. It exists completely free of us yet is in us and, I believe also, is us too. In more recent times, we've made love into a rather mawkish and over-sentimental emotion thanks in part to over-sentimental Hollywood films that do not reflect the true gritty nature of life. It is bandied around without thought. Love you, we say as a goodbye on the phone. That's OK of course but it somehow takes away from its profundity - not that we have time to think deeply about its meaning when we say 'love you'. It seems mean of me to say but I am fascinated by love and believe it is far, far more than we can begin to imagine but that's me and I guess love is what you make it. I think and feel that love is an energy, fundamental to life, a source of life not just for human beings but for animals, plants, all creatures that are alive that have a vibration and so this includes the rocks and the earth, the water and air and even the fire.
Masaru Emoto, who sadly died seven years ago was a water wizard. Ridiculed by the scientific community for his so called pseudoscience, he nevertheless continued his experiments into the vibrations through water that showed incredible patterns when infused with certain words, especially the word 'love'. Understandably, the scientific community can't be seen to get involved in things they can't measure or understand through mainstream science and resort to ridicule as a sort of defence. But I know Emoto was right - and so did he. We are vibrational beings. Go down, down, down through all the layers of our physical being - and you can keep going for ever it seems - and you come across molecules of vibrating atoms. Each atom or molecule vibrates differently depending on its atomic mass as shown in the periodic table of our schooldays: lead atoms will vibrate slowly since all the molecules are quite densely packed while helium will be much faster and so on and so forth. Heat and cold excite or calm the atoms and molecules. Anyway, I'm no scientist and don't pretend to know about chemistry but the point being the vibration and whether or not we can affect it. Emoto wrote out words such as 'love' and 'hate' and stuck them onto different vessels containing water and froze them to look at the crystalline structure and they were fascinating. Love crystals were beautiful and perfectly geometrical while hate crystals were ugly and deformed. He found the same contrasts with waters taken from polluted rivers or pristine springs.
The purer something is, the more akin to love it is. Love is a pure energy permeating everything. It is an invisible web that binds things together. A web of life that is hidden from daily view yet exists in a different plane and influences us throughout our lives. It is in the air, the trees, the rocks. It is between people and in people. It is a profound and wonderful thing.
Love affects things deeply, vibrating outwards. You shower love on a young kitten or puppy and it generally reflects that love back to you. Obviously, the same thing happens with a baby. He or she grows up feeling supported and held and they become confident children and whole adults who can usually love deeply too. The feeling of being 'in love' is one of the most incredible and beautiful things we experience in life and when it is reciprocated fully, well, wow! It is almost as if you are one person, the rhythm and vibration of two lives operating on the same frequency. You dance along that invisible thread together but it is intense and maybe can't always be maintained. We talk about how being 'in love' changes to just loving someone over time and in some cases 'falling out of love' as if you've slipped from the highwire and if, heaven forbid, you end up hating each other then the thread is completely broken and ugliness has returned. I often muse on how love is a feeling, we feel it and can't think it but hate is a thinking thing that can't be truly felt, not by the heart. I feel the heart is too delicate an instrument to 'feel' hate.
Of course we get choices as we grow up and making wrong choices can lead us down different paths, sometimes away from love. Being on a path of love, generally brings more loving into your life but love must start with self-love. This is not some narcissistic trait, it is a fundamental truth. Love starts within. This is not loving how you look by the way, it is loving who you are deep inside, accepting all parts of yourself without question. Loving your wobbly bits, your peevish bits, being aware of these. This is how you are and you love yourself, accept yourself. You don't have to please anyone, you don't have to be a certain type of person - this is how you are. It is unconditional. Loving what you do, who you're with, and where you live shows. If you love what you do and what you create, fulsomely without question - not always easy I admit and something that needs to be reflected on - then that is enough. You are already a success in life.
Some people say they love money. This is not a pure love. It is using the word 'love' in a rather awkward context. This is muddy water. Money is an inanimate object, an idea more than a real thing. It exists in another sort of plane because in essence it is not real. Gold is real though but money is not gold. It used to be and sometimes is. Can you love gold? Being an artist, I know I love the colour 'gold' but not necessarily the feel of it. Big clanking coins - can I love them? Is this more to do with something called 'greed' and desire. Is this where the word 'love' is misappropriated and turned into something it is not? The same goes for the muddying between 'love' and 'lust'. For me anyway, lust can so easily be confused with love but is nothing like it. Love is unconditional - when we say 'unconditional' about love, it sort of doesn't mean anything. How can there be conditions placed on love anyway? Love is always unconditional. The word 'unconditional' is surplus to requirements. And then we come back to self-love which can mutate so easily into pride, considered the most pernicious of the seven deadly sins. In each case, and we could talk about the other four deadly sins, there is a fine but recognisable line between 'love' and the relevant sin.
Loving another allows you to let go of them, in love, when the threads are not so strong. The feelings will persist even if they are not reciprocated. It happened to me. I had a beautiful, deep and pure love with my partner for seven years. A few things happened to us including the burning of our land by a huge engulfing forest fire and the poisoning of our well and, combined with my own feelings of being lost and angry, the threads unravelled. Still to this day, now 3 years later, I grieve for what I lost and for my part in allowing the threads to become unstitched. There were other factors involved but I take responsibility for the ending of our journey. It was as if I had broken the most precious object in the universe. The night I learned about my partners's decision was one of the worst experiences of my life. I was in agony. I didn't blame her though. I could see clearly how this had happened and before I went to bed I went and did one of my meditations and through this, I truly felt that all I wanted was the best for her and that I let her go in love. It didn't heal my agony but it ameliorated the feelings and I was able to sleep. I still wish only the best for her and her new partner. It fills me with love to think of them now and I have no desire to win her back or cause her any anguish. I know she loves me too even if she doesn't say it. After we had been separated for about a year, she came to our house, way out in the mountains, to get her things. We got on as always and then she told me that she loved me, that this love had never died and I truly felt the truth of it too. It was love and didn't need another word to justify where it rated on a virtual scale like 'affection' or 'fondness'. Love is.
All this writing about love has made me curious about its origins, its etymology. A brief trawl through the internet showed me how love and what it is has been a subject of debate and scrutiny since ancient times. Indeed, the very essence of love has permeated all our cultures and is closely associated with 'god'. Some said love was an actual god. 'God is love' is an often used phrase but what is 'god' and then again, what is love? I imagine we will never agree. It remains as a mystery, a deep abiding mystery but the closest I can get is that it is the glue that connects us to everything and fuels creation. When love is absent, things fall apart, like relationships or jobs. Love is all around, the song goes and I think that, yes, it is.
With love to you all.
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