Love Is

     What is love? Is it an interpersonal attraction that lies between two people? Is it a passionate desire for passion and romance creating a sexual fervor in the heat of the moment? Is it the emotional closeness and loyalty that binds a family together? Is it platonic that defines a friendship, or is it a spiritual oneness between an individual and their deity that is thought to bring about wholeness? In our modern society, love can be very difficult to define. It can also be easily confused with lust. My personal definition for love did not come from a book. Nor did it come from an emotion or one of scholarly form. Rather I learned that the definition of love in its truest, most intrinsically valuable form, is simply in its existence: Love simply is.
     Love has been known to traverse great distances in pursuit of its counterpart. The knight in his noble calling and chivalry would welcome Heaven and valiantly suffer Hell to rescue his dearly beloved. Love is neither proud, nor boastful. Love is the hidden pearl that hides within a hard-hearted individual only to truly show itself when tested, tried, and true. Love also has a price.
     Love costs everything. In Sir William Shakespeare's tragedy of Romeo & Juliette we find it costs two lives only to leave behind a sour effigy, bitter epilogue, and potentially poor carbon copy of the original seed of itself. On the contrary, love is the sweetest, most desirable noun and verb that we all crave. It is we who stand foolishly in the way of love only to find ourselves replacing it with an empty counterfeit. We pollute the void in our hearts with a lust for shallow objects in this world only to find that we truly are denying ourselves the wondrous adventure known to all mankind.
     As opposed to the latter, love is really quite simple. It is the emotional well-being of character that drives an individual to perform great feats of integrity and honor. Love is what causes us, as the Greek philosopher Epictetus states, "to be content to be thought foolish and stupid." Love allows our mistakes to teach. Love causes us to rise above the standard of the commonality of man. Love catches us doing our best and our worst. Love died for us when we did not deserve it. Love caused us to be resurrected and to resurrect others from the lifeless, void we have in this world today. Love is all we ever truly need to enjoy the simplest matters of life and to allow ourselves to peer deeply into the complexities of mankind to help each other rise out of the ashes as a phoenix draws into flight!
Love...simply...is.

Author's Note

Ponder deeply the Truth that lies in Love.