Love. How can such a simple word be used to describe such an infinitely complex subject? The Beatles sang that it is all we need. Sunday school songs proclaim that it is God. It persists as the elusive Holy Grail of enlightened aspiration.
The holidays presented me with ample opportunity to contemplate the meaning and nature of love. "Love came down at Christmas" and all that. Because love requires the context of relationship, family was a natural place to turn for better understanding.
Romantic love is all about sunshine and flowers, all about feeling good. But romantic love isn't what family is all about. Indeed, such a notion quickly becomes creepy. Still, the misconception of love being all good with none of the bad leads to ugly distortions.
True love is holistic; by that I mean it includes the sorrow as well as the joy, the agony as well as the ecstasy. When someone I love hurts, I hurt with them. When someone I love feels good, it makes me feel good, too. True love cannot exist in isolation because it's viability absolutely requires relationship.
"What the world needs now is love, sweet love." I agree completely, but would be more comfortable substituting "true" for "sweet." I love and am loved, truly. Such a statement is, however, valid only when it is unconditional. Let me learn to love more completely and selflessly so that I may help bring this world one step closer to being a loving one.
Steve and I saw the movie Tristan and Isolde yesterday. We had used that story/legend to analyze romantic love in my art of relationships class. The book we used dissected the story with Jungian concepts, concluding that romantic love was nothing more than a figment of Western society's imagination. However seeing it in the theater was beautiful. Romantic love, family love, even love of a land were all represented well. It made me realize that sometimes trying to define exactly what love is or why it happens is futile. It's better just to explore it through experience.
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