Love Is All
If I have all faith to move Mountains but have no love, I am nothing - Corinthians
Life is a landscape of love and love is the celebration of life. Love is the means and love is the end. Love is our way and it is our destination. There is no way to love: love is the way and love is the goal. Love is a way of being. Love is a way of life.
When we are in love we are in love all the time. We are in love every moment. The moment we wake up, we fall in love with each other and with life itself. Falling in love is not a one day event, it is an everyday event. Love never ends. Love endures. We are spellbound by the mystery of love forever. It’s love for the sake of loving. There is no other motivation. Love is not logic, love is pure magic. Love is pure poetry and pure pleasure.
Love is sacred. Love is unlimited and unconditional. Allow yourself to be swept away by the force of love. True love is to love even when your beloved is less than perfect. It is easy to love someone who is good and perfect. But true love is to love even those who may not be so good. To love is to be free from criticizing, complaining and comparing. To practice universal love is to recognize that those who behave badly do so because they have not been loved. WH Auden goes even further when he says that: “Those to whom evil is done do evil in return.”
When Christ said “Love your enemy”, he did not say it lightly. He was serious. He believed that “Amor Vincit Omnia”, love conquers all. By love, enemy becomes friend. Love keeps no record of wrong doings. Love is not a path for the faint-hearted. Love requires courage, courage to turn the other cheek. To love is to be brave. Sing the song of love and all your worries and miseries will evaporate! Live in the ecstasy of love. Then you will be sustained by love.
Love is the acceptance of oneself as one is, and acceptance of the other as the other is. Acceptance without expectation, without judgement and without qualification. Love, free of expectations, encounters no disappointment. Love is to accept bitter with sweet, dark with light, pain with pleasure, all with equanimity. The moment we bring love into our hearts, we transform illusion into imagination, and duality into unity. We transcend from likes and dislikes and enter into the celebration of life as it is. When we drink the sweet nectar of love, there is a transformation. As Jalal ud-Din Rumi, the Sufi poet, said,
By love, the bitter becomes sweet;
By love, copper becomes gold;
By love, the dregs become clear;
By love, pain becomes healing.
This is the transformative power of love.
To love is to see god, because god is love and love is god. To mystics and Sufi poets god appears as the beloved and the beloved as god. Love is the greatest religion on earth. Love is the mother of all virtues; peace and compassion, generosity and humility are born from love. Love is majestic and magnificent. Where there is love, there is hope. Love and rejoice.
Where do we start our journey of love? We start with ourselves. Christ said, “Love your neighbour as yourself.” The word ‘yourself’ is the key. As you love yourself, love others. The ‘other’ is only an extension of yourself. Loving your ‘self’ is not selfish! If you cannot love yourself, how can you love someone else, and why should you expect someone else to love you?
Accepting yourself as you are and loving yourself for being who you are is a prerequisite for loving others as they are and who they are. We are made of each other.
Lovers take no offence and give no offence. Lovers take no enemies, make no enemies and have no enemies. Animosity is a consequence of hate and friendship is the consequence of love. As bees love flowers and produce honey, lovers love each other and produce happiness. Love is the purpose of life and through love we find the meaning of life.
To live is to love and to love is to risk, to risk being hurt, to risk the possibility of not being loved in return. Do not wish to have a lover, simply be a lover. Having a lover is a result of being a lover.
Love awakens the soul, love nourishes the heart, love brings joy to our lives. Love is the most beautiful mantra of the mind. The balm of love heals all wounds, the wounds of anger and anxiety, the wounds of fear and resentment.
Love of yourself, love of your beloved, love of people and love of Nature is a continuum. We need to be kind to ourselves and to all others so that no one needs to be subjected to suffering and everyone can experience the joy of love and drink the nectar of love.
Love is as natural to us as breathing. Rumi says, “Your task is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against love.”
This all-embracing love manifests through many forms such as philology (love of learning), philosophy (love of wisdom), and philanthropy (love of people). More intimately we experience erotic love. How beautiful it is to fall in love and be in the embrace of one’s beloved! But falling in love is not an event taking place only once in a lifetime. If we want, we can and we should fall in love every day. Falling in love is a miracle. We are born thanks to the act of making love. Everyone is a love child. There is no original sin; only original love.
Poets, artists and mystics experience the ecstasy of romantic love physically, emotionally, imaginatively and spiritually. Romantic poetry and art celebrate our heart connections with each other, with nature and with humans. Love takes us beyond reason, beyond intellect and beyond description. Love brings us to a place beyond right and wrong, a place of magnanimity and generosity. This is deep love of life. All we need is love because love is everything. Love is the answer. What is your question?