From outside the box

What is love? This is a question we should spend our whole life pondering. And as with all great questions, any answer should lead to greater questions. There are no right or wrong answers. There is no complete understanding. And any degree of understanding or knowledge of love must come from experience.
God, love, truth, consciousness, universal, light, music, being, eternity, these words are more than nouns, verbs, or adjectives, they are concepts. They go on forever. You can only experience or understand part of a concept, you never got the whole picture. If somebody asked me to explain the meaning of life in one sentence, I would say that life is an opportunity to gain greater awareness and understanding of these concepts.

Love is an illusion as well as a truth. The illusion of love is that we need it, we want it, we deserve it, it must come to us, it must be given to us. This comes from the ego. The passions of youth are really about self survival and self desires. This is when we expect something in return for love. It can be easy to mistake "need" for love. Nature plays a tricky game with our feelings of love when it comes to propagation of the species. Sex, desire, passion, wanting, and need are not love and yet, they can be a part of the experience of love.

I have always enjoyed writing poetry as well as songs. I can remember falling in love and feeling so overwhelmed with passion that I could not find words to express my feelings. So I would often write a song. In a song, you are still limited by words, but you have the extra dimension of melody to enrich your poetry, and often melody can express passion better than words. But now when I look back on these feelings, thru the detachment of time, I can see that I really just wanted to get laid, or I was looking for something outside of myself to make me feel better or to take away the loneliness. But don't tell me that at the time because at the time, I knew I was in love. It's hard when your older and you see younger people over reacting to these passions, knowing that the end result may be a broken heart or worse, an unwanted pregnancy.

When I was 32, I got dumped by a lady that I had been in a relationship with for two years. It hurt like hell! I wanted her back so bad. However, I forced myself to look at it from a different angle. I told myself that if I really loved her, then I should want what was best for her and if going on without me was best for her, then I was happy for her and I knew this was the best thing to happen. Although the child inside kept yelling out, "What about me? I'm dying here!", I refused to give that child too much of my attention. By keeping my focus on the bigger picture, I found that I was able to move on much quicker than I did in earlier break ups where the inner child got all of my attention.

Love is expressed in its greater truth when it reaches out, when it is given without condition or expectation. I believe that mans greatest capacity for love is directly connected to his inability to deny the pain and struggle of others that he is not directly connected to. It's easy to deny what does not personally affect our lives or what we don't see. If I had to define what a true saint is, I would say that a saint is a person who cannot deny another's pain, even if that other person (animal, or cause, or whatever) is not a part of their immediate world. A saint has no limits on empathy. A saint does not have the luxury that most of us have to practice the fine art of denial. A saint is concerned with the bigger picture as well as the smaller one. A saint is one who practices love in it's greater truth.

I am not a saint. I know there are people starving in Africa, I know the rain forest is depleting, I know the ice caps are melting, but I have the shameful ability to block these things out, at least to any degree that requires acting outside of my comfort zone. I also know that when I can no longer practice denial, when I know that the struggle and pain of any of my fellow species, anywhere on this planet, as well as the planet itself, is my concern as well as my responsibility, and when I not only write about it, but act on it as well, then I will have learned more of the greater truth of love.