Love Is
By Victoria Lynn Hall
What is Love? Many of us, if asked that question today, might reply that love is a mystery; that it defies explanation; that Love just is. That's what I would say and yet I have been guilty of defining love within far more strict boundaries than that in past relationships. I have been guilty of listening to my ego when it whispers, "if that person really loved you they wouldn't do this or they would do that." I have been guilty of robbing myself of the experience of love by thinking I knew what it was.
None of us can really have a working definition of love because if it is real love, it is always expanding. What we do have are many messages connected to love. Messages we picked up in our childhood, in society and even from the media. Love is giving, Love is nurturing, Love is Sex, Love is harmony, Love is suffering, etc. All of these messages regarding our experience of love may be true but they are never the whole story. As long as we are living we have more to learn about what love is, how it works and where it can be found. For now, all we can know is Love is Love and no other word that we have learned thus far offers a suitable comparison.
Not knowing exactly what love is does not stop us from having it or, more importantly, from knowing it when it comes along. What keeps us from recognizing love is that we assign it a specific form in our minds. If we think love is gentle we may miss it when it rolls into our life like a thunder storm. If we think love is going to hit us like lightning we might miss the slow burning fire of love that develops out of friendship. Most likely, however, love is powerful enough to blow away our generalized preconceptions at the start but over time the more specific rules and guidelines we have created in our mental handbooks on love can get in it's way.
For example, somewhere along the line I got a message that silence wasn't love. I remember one day asking my husband a question and not getting an answer back. I can distinctly remember my ego babbler saying, "Oh no, he isn't talking to you, he must be mad, you must have done something wrong and now he is not going to love you anymore." Fortunately I didn't listen to this babbling and I soon discovered that my husband simply didn't hear me over the noise of the radio. However, even if he had been angry that wouldn't have meant he didn't love me. That is just another message I picked up along the way, one many of us seem to have gotten - "Anger isn't love."
We are taught that love is kind and gentle but that doesn't mean that the people who love us always are. Being angry is not about being loving or unloving, it is about being human and having feelings. Contrary to popular opinion I do not believe that love is strictly a feeling. Feelings are forms, we can describe them with specific terms like anger, jealousy, sadness and frustration. Love is a force that can take any form.
Love, like any other spiritual force is everything and nothing at the same time. It can take on or dis-inhabit any form to serve it's purposes. What is love's purpose? There are probably many but at the moment I understand love's purpose to be to inspire growth and expansion for only through developing these can we come to rise above the differences that prevent us from knowing love.
Love does not serve us, we serve love and in doing so we serve our highest good. When we try to manipulate love to serve us we actually succeed in interrupting the flow of love. It is this interruption of love's flow that many of us experience as a lack of love in our lives or contributes to our experience of love as something that restricts rather than expands our possibilities. Love is a spirit which, like our own souls, requires freedom in order to fulfill it's highest potential.
The saying goes, "If you love something set it free, if it comes back to you it is yours, if it doesn't it never was." The thing is that even when what or who you love comes back to you, they are still free. We can't judge anyone's love for us by their willingness to compromise that freedom in order to please us. In fact, wanting anyone or anything to behave in any specific way in order to prove their love for us, or thinking we ourselves need to change in order to deserve love, only supports a belief that we do not deserve love. The truth is that if we want love to protect us from life, to keep us safe, secure and guarded from risk or change we do not deserve love and we are not likely to find it. This is because love seeks to destroy the boundaries that give us the illusion of safety. If you think about some of the things you have done in the name of love you should find this to be true. What else but love inspires us to risk and to change against the weight of our fears and ego serving instincts? What else but love can force us to open our hearts and minds enough to let anyone get close enough to hurt or to heal?
So how do we find love? First we have to trust that Love Is; that it exists for us right here and right now. Then, believe it or not, love will find us. Yes, it sounds so simple but the way of spirit is always simple. What makes it difficult, however, is that the ego fears love and thus it does everything it can to convince us that love does not exist. Love is a danger to the ego because it is a destroyer of forms and the ego is attached to forms.
One of the biggest lessons love teaches us is that all forms are temporary. As human beings we ourselves are temporary and it can be frightening for us to love each other knowing that inevitably our spirits will depart from our human forms. To truly love someone, however, is to see beyond the illusion of their form and reveal the beauty of their spirit. If instead of loving spirit we are loving form sooner or later we will lose that which we love if we ever had it. The ego can not survive real love because love sees right through it to that part of all of us which is already and always perfect.
Trusting that Love Is can strengthen relationships based on spirit by helping us to see that love is indeed the force behind another's actions even when those actions don't take the form we want or expected. However, trusting Love's existence can destroy relationships based on form because of the stark contrast it reveals between itself and the ego-based needs some relationships are built upon.
It is true that relationships are hard work. However, that work is not to manipulate each other to be anything other than what we are. That work is finding the strength to allow each other to be none other than what you are and finding the beauty there. Only love knows what real beauty is, that it is not in this form rather than in that one but in the brilliance that is behind all forms. Love sees that brilliance, knows that brilliance and seeks to reveal it. By trusting love we can also see that brilliance, even in places, things and people we never thought to look for it in before. By trusting that "love is" we can let it be our guide to beauty and peace.
