What is Love?

I feel like I need something more than the all-white canvas that Blogger is giving me to paint this post in word-based ink.  I am aware that a post on love and a blog about mindfulness seem categorically separate, but what could be more organically interwoven than these two things?  I have been pondering the notion of love as of late.  What does it mean, how do we recognize it, where does it come from....  Earlier today I wrote this about love: "Gratitude.  Holistic understanding, receiving, the blossomings of deeper trust and appreciation."  It wasn't scripted, but it was an attempt to articulate (at least an aspect of) love.  But then maybe love is something that can't be articulated, only lived.  Maybe the work of loving someone reveals the meaning, maybe only that reveals the meaning.  And I say "work."  Why do I say work?  Perhaps I will cycle back to that.

One thing I learned about a year ago from a mentor was that love is held within the lover.  I knew this because he said "I love you" way too soon into our relationship for it to have anything to do with me or our relationship.  It was something he was choosing.  He loved me because he decided he did.  Because the capacity was alive in him, and he extended that to me as one within his sphere.  I have found this as of late.  Love is not something I have to create with someone, it is something I have within me to share with or extend to an individual, individuals, or communities that can receive that love.  And some who cannot.  Perhaps mindfulness helps us determine when, and how, to love.  Perhaps mindfulness also invites us to deepen our awareness of love's presence.  As it allows us to deepen our awareness of all things present within.  As Thay says, we water the seeds of love and compassion within ourselves.  We can only do this by being mindful of them.  As I choose to water those seeds, I see that I am able to be present to others.  I remember once that my brother said a favorite word of his for God was Presence.  This was perhaps ten years ago.  And today I will say that I believe a favorite word of mine for love is also presence.  To be present to a flower, a child, a lover, a sunset, a moon, a bit of food.  To be present also to our fears, a piece of disgusting garbage, our anger... perhaps this is also love.  Because love has to embrace everything - the "loveable" and the "unloveable" or else what is it?  Categorizing and judging worthiness are ways we limit love.  I remember what Richard Rohr says about love as epistemology.  In our society we so often seek to know before we choose to love.  This way we maintain a kind of control that can determine the worthiness or unworthiness of that which is loved.  Rohr says that we must replace this with loving as a way of knowing.  This way we don't seek to know first, and then determine if love is merited.  We love as a way of knowing.  It becomes our starting point.  Then everything belongs.  We embrace it all.  This is like the breath.  Breathing in I know that I am breathing in, breathing out I know that I am breathing out.  There is nothing excluded from the breath.  We do not examine each moment to see if it is worth breathing.  We breathe as a way of living each moment.  Everything belongs.  The hatred, the fear, the doubt, the anxiety.  There's an openness here, a way of being that embraces change, loss, permanence, doubt, hope... love.  Perhaps it is like Schweitzer's famous (in my world at least) ending to his epic Quest of the Historical Jesus.  Perhaps we cannot, ultimately, know who this historical Jesus was, he says.  Not in his fullness.  Perhaps we can only catch glimpses of who he was before the gospel records painted their images of him.  But, says Schweitzer, still he comes to us as of old, by the wayside, beckoning us to come and follow him.  To those that accept the call, he will be made known to them in the trials and tribulations that are to follow.  In the Mennonite tradition, the beginning of Christianity is an answer to the call "Come, follow me."  We do not start with an idea, or a concept.  We start on a journey.  We start with a step.

Perhaps it is the same with love.  We do not begin with ideas about love; we simply answer the call, Come, follow me.  And in that journey we learn what love is.  Or perhaps there is no beginning in this path.  No starting or stopping.  Only doing.  Only loving.  And still I stop.  I go back to my breath.  I open to what this mystery is asking from me.  I let my heart open, like a flower.  I learn from the things of this world - the flowers, the trees with their roots and leaves, the birds with their song, the grass with its dying and returning.  And perhaps in this, too, I learn to love.

In gratitude and wonder.  With a song in my heart that is also silent.  Breathing.

Softly.