What Love Is

Love is not desire, wanting. It is not seeking joy or pleasure. Desire and seeking are mere aspiration. Love exists in the relationship with what’s in front of us. It is the experience of actively knowing and caring for something. Not out of need or desire. Not from a hope for satiety or some happy state. 

Love is what connects, what joins. Always. And so it cannot be emotion because emotions come and go; emotions are ephemeral. Love cannot be a thing such as esteem or respect. These are judgements, products of the mind that change. Love doesn’t alter; it can’t be lost because opinions or attitudes change. Love is the connection, itself, the binding force that joins one soul to another, one soul to all of consciousness. 

Love is not waiting to love. Waiting occurs in a netherworld of possibility and potential. Love is being in relationship – caring for and seeing the other. Love is doing, in each moment, what relationship requires.

Sacrifice can be a momentary act of love – but not love itself. Love is not sacrifice or unswerving service. Love is not giving up or surrendering the self for another. To the extent you deny and diminish yourself, love diminishes because the / has been lost in relationship to thou. The loss of self destroys relationship – and love. Because love can’t exist between nothing and something.