What is love? Define it and you still can't quite say that is love. A great many have tried defining it. A great many have written about it, sang about it and even fought and died for it. So, exactly what is love?
It is she/he who is lucky is able to find love and it is he/she who is patient is able to keep it. Finding love is not as easy as it sounds. It's not like going shopping. If you don't find it in this store, you proceed to another and if not you go online looking for that iPhone or PSP. I wish it were that easy! If it was that easy for you, then you are the lucky few! But, finding it we all strive to, regardless.
Well, to be more precise, you can't find love. Rather, love finds you! ;-)
When your heart is open, when you are ready, love will surely find you. Sometimes, unexpectedly. Sometimes, not coming from who you think it'd be. But surely, it will be there one way or another.
Most of us have feel love or be in love in our lives (I'm assuming readers here are at least 12 years old!)! So, perhaps, it's puppy love, perhaps it's mature love or perhaps it's even infatuation at best. Still it did feel like love, didn't it? So who is to tell you it's not love? Right?!
I'm not the person to write about love either. I know love when I feel love. That I can assure you. But to write about it is beyond my poetic sense. You need a poet to write about something as simple and yet complicated and exotic as love.
I did read a very good book which I related to when it comes to my sense of love and being in love and what love ought to be like. It's Marianne Williamson's book on Enchanted Love. I feel her way of writing connects with what I thought and feel love should be and strived to be. So, if you are interested in another's perspective of love as life essential, then read this underrated book. I think for those of you who are either in search of love or hope to recognize it when it hits you in the face (hehe, sometimes, we are quite literally blind), I think this is perhaps a good book to start! I've reread it a couple of times and love it!
Here's some excerpts from the book:
"OUR DEEPEST HUMAN NEED is not material at all: Our deepest need is to be seen. We need adventure. We need meaning. We need identity. We need love. Someone who has seen us through loving eyes has awakened us from the ranks of the formerly dead. Most people bear the terminal stress of walking the world unseen, a mere number or cog in a lifeless machine. Mystical romance is a space of resurrection and repair. It does more than help us survive a soulless world; it helps us to transform it. The problem with most intimate relationships is that they are not romantic. They do not involve a deeper knowing, and thus there is diminished possibility of sacred, transformative sharing. To be truly seen, in all our innocence and glory, is to be truly healed. What we salute in one another, we call forth in one another.
So many people say that they are looking for love, yet they are actually committed to never finding it. Many people would really rather not know of the scars and triumphs of the person who lies in their arms. Many people who say they are looking for love are merely looking for superficial comfort. Real love entails readiness to die to who we were, in order to be born again prepared for love, truly worthy of the romantic heights. Real love is comforting, to be sure, but not always at first. In becoming romantic artists, we must pierce the armor that hides our hearts, and that piercing is not comfortable. It is horrible and painful. It can take years of tears to melt the hardness that develops in this world, covering our tender, gentler, inner selves. Tears for every devastating loss. Tears for every humiliating failure. Tears for every repeated mistake. Those who allow those tears, even honor those tears, are not failures at love but rather its true initiates. First the pain, and then the power. First the heart breaks and then it soars.
Love will push every button, try every faith, challenge every strength, trigger every weakness, mock every value, and then leave you there to die. But once you begin to turn the corner, to leave love's bush league and enter the pros, there is no worldly activity that can match the joy of flying like an eagle through the skies of a lover's heart."
Incidentally, I thought Richard Bach's take on Soulmate is just as enlightening:
"A soulmate is someone who has locks that fit our keys, and keys to fit our locks. When we feel safe enough to open the locks, our trust selves step out and we can be completely and honestly who we are; we can be loved for who we are and not for who we're pretending to be. Each unveils the best part of the other. No matter what else goes wrong around us, with that one person we're safe in our own paradise. Our soulmate is someone who shares our deepest longings, our sense of direction. When we're two balloons, and together our direction is up, chances are we've found the right person. Our soulmate is the one who makes life come to life."
