On The Question: What Is Love?
There’s quite a few people to whom I say ‘I love’. The words ‘I love you’ come out of my mouth sometimes several times a day.
Perhaps it doesn’t really matter what it means (that word ‘love’) - if it feels good and ‘honest’ then why not just say it?
That being said, why not take a little time to explore the theme? Simply to see if there’s something else to be unearthed…
Love, after all, is a great mystery. Like the Tao, if one thinks one ‘knows’ it then one most certainly does not know it. To keep searching, discovering, evolving IS the solution. It is all one can ever do perhaps.
I started to understand (or further misunderstand) love when I took a trip to Spain a few years back, to walk the Camino del Norte. I walked for 3 weeks, every day without a break. Nobody knew what happened to me when I was out there. I told nobody a thing. And so the time existed, the experiences of course happened, I lived it and still enjoy the memories I have of that particular period.
That being said, there’s no extra ‘taste’ or story around it. I am not carrying my past with me from that time. It does not exist anymore.
It was, at first, a deliberate experiment - to not tell a soul about who I’d met, where, when, how and why I experienced the trip in the way I did, and all other such details. Now, however, it is more somewhat ingrained. The habit stuck and (mostly) I’ve little sense of anything ‘happening’ at all.
That could be Love in a nutshell: the absence of meaning, of defining and of ‘storytelling’. As expressed in the timeless ‘Tao Te Ching’, that which is spoken of as Tao is not the real Tao…
Our senses lose their ‘sense’ when overused, our self is numbed by our own stories and descriptions of it, we are drowned by our own labels, adjectives and identities.
Making love is that hopeless yet inevitable ‘throwing away’ of all such selves - losing ourselves in another and into the Universe’s orchestra of unnameable, disordered patterns, relationships and events.
What might such a life look like then? Pretty ordinary perhaps.
After all, the Tao (much like ‘love’) can never in fact be lost… but it CAN be found!
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