My World Gathering

Anna D: Whoa Leith, talk about the big ones! I guess we're all sitting waiting for someone else to go first (I know I was!) so here is something to get things moving - I'll try to come back later with something more but for now this will have to do... 'Love is a many splendid thing' as the quote goes and has about as many different definitions as the Eskimos have for snow if not more, yet we somehow seem to expect people to know what we mean by using just the one - which can often seem inadequate, misleading, downright confusing and sometimes scary! I love sunsets and stars, my cat, my family, my friends, hot chocolate on a winters evening, sitting contemplatively on a hillside, splodging along a beach, playing in the snow... yet none of these are the same kinds of love, nor do they cover the kind of bursting at the seams experiences of love that come from moments of shared togetherness be they emotional, physical or spiritual. They don't cover the sense of divine love (for lack of a better discription) that links us all at a fundamental (elemental?) level. Love is. It is something we have within us, that we feel, do , give and share and probably many other verbs. To narrow it down to a smaller definition is like narrowing god down to a Charlton Heston lookalike sitting someplace on a cloud - it is so much more! Apart from now having the Howard Jones song stuck in my head all kinds of thoughts on love are now whizzing around being incoherent so I'll leave this now and hope that someone else can pick up the ball and run with it! (12/17/05)

Leith: Here’s what I think about love . . .

Love is what I feel when I look for the beauty in the world around me, the goodness in another person. Sometimes their inner light shines so brightly I can’t help but see it, but often my own concerns blind me to their beauty, and I have to choose to look before I can notice and feel. It helps when I remember that every person is perfect in all the ways that are important; every person is precious regardless of what they do or say or think or look like. Every person has inherent value. Every person is mine to treasure. Sometimes it helps to live in the moment, instead of in my head.

There is never a shortage of love, because love is a property of me, not of the world. I can always make more love . . . it’s as easy as making a wish. Love is unconditional, and kind. It says more about the g (01/15/06)

Leith: okay, that's weird, it cut my comment in half. Here's the rest :0)

. . .iver than the receiver. Love is doing the right thing, even if somebody already told you to and made you want to do the opposite! Love is respecting other people’s truth. I find that hard to do all the time. Sometimes it helps to ‘consider the creative possibility that arise when there are differences of opinion’.

Love is both the most and the least selfish thing I know of. When I am filled with love for another person I can’t help but put them first. Altruism becomes inevitable. The paradox of this is that loving fills me with joy and wonder. When I love I become bigger somehow. I smile without knowing why. I am at peace with myself, and content that ‘all is right with the world’. Love is something I do, and doing it makes me see the world in a different way. (01/15/06)

Charlotte : I like that definition Leith....love is something you do. |a friend said to me once that love is a verb. To me this means that love is not a concept or an idea, it only gains reality by being put into action. I am reminded of that famous bible passage from Corinthians:Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud...Love does not delight in evil but rejoices in the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. What this says to me if that love is the bottom line, the fundamental, the thread that links up all that is good in the world. Its something to aspire to and reach for. I may have said i love you before but the love i was feeling wasn't the love described here. It wasn't patient, kind, selfless. So was it love at all? Could what we so often think of as love really be needilness, familiarity, a desire to be important to someone? The more I think about it, love that is, the more the answer keeps slipping away. (01/25/06)

Anna D: You ask can love change? I've been thinking about this a lot recently and whilst I think the answer is yes I think what happens more often is our interpretation of that love, our perception of it changes. As something people crave in it's different forms it is all too easy to see love for something/one for what you want it to be rather than for what it is. What it is may be just as precious and beautiful as what you'd rather it was but to don those rose tinted spectacles and see only what you want to see is all too easily done - I know I'm guilty of it! When it feels like our love has changed all too often it is more likely to be that we have woken up to what has really been there all along rather than what we wanted there to be - this can be either a disappointment or a great joy! But equally our understanding of someone elses love (in all its forms) for us can change. As someone who has a whole heap of insecurities I need to hear words to validate my interpretation of someones actions - to really know that I'm not getting it all wrong. It is easy for me to get caught up in this need and not see/trust the evidence before my eyes for what it is and as some people just don't use words to express such things I cause myself a lot of needless uncertainty. I guess this can be where the love is patient can come in - some of us take longer to work these things out than others... (02/01/06)

Leith: That's a really interesting comment Anna :0)

In the middle you say "When it feels like our love has changed all too often it is more likely to be that we have woken up to what has really been there all along rather than what we wanted there to be". It seems to me that you're saying the love itself hasn't actually changed . . . it was always like that, but now you see the 'truth' about the love, rather than having a faulty perception of it. Is that right? I'm not sure if I'm getting you properly . . .

If that is kinda what you mean . . . I'm not sure that that's quite how I see the world (. . . this is me trying to respectfully and lovingly disagree =) ) . . . I'm with you on it being the perception that changes, rather than the love itself, but I think our understanding of the love IS 'reality' - or as close to it as it's possible to get. So I don't think the new perception/understanding is any true-er than the old one. The example I'm thinking of is an romantic couple:

they go along thinking 'we're in love, we're in love, 'we're in love' . . . and then one day one of them thinks 'no we're not'. It's pretty easy to follow that thought with 'we were never REALLY in love . . . we just thought we were' or 'there was something wrong with our love that made it imperfect and doomed to failure'. I don't think that means the original love wasn't true, I think it's just a consequence of human beings liking things to make sense and be consistent. When they break up it becomes necessary to somehow explain how something like love could just stop. An easy way of doing that is to claim it was never really there in the first place.

I guess I think that our understandings of the world are pretty powerful, and pretty revisionist (that is, we don't remember what actually happened, we remember what 'must have' happened in light of our current understandings . . . there is actually heaps of experimental psychological evidence for memory being reconstructive like this). And I find the idea of 'cognitive dissonance' useful . . . the concept that if there is some discrepancy between our beliefs and our actions, one or the other will change so they're more consistant. So, for example, if you make somebody act really mean towards another person, they start to think that person is not as nice. Once again, there are heaps of (slightly scary) psych studies showing exactly that.

I also think that in a situation involving love, it's kind of a pity for people to limit themselves in this way. If we come to understand our love in a different way, and we assume it must have always been like that, we can lose the really cool things about our original love. I don't mean that love couldn't or shouldn't change . . . just that I'd rather have the best possible love with each person in my life, because why settle for less! (02/01/06)

Julian: All your wonderful comments have led me to thinking about some distinctions. There's love as a verb, William Penn's "Let us then try what Love will do". This is active, it eminates from us. To me it seems wholly good. It is a conscious choice to give unconditionally. Then there is love as attachment. To 'fall in love' seems like something that is being done to us, almost an accident, outside our control. To love someone so much it would cause you terrible pain if they were hurt feels similar. Is this love as a need? Or is it love as a bond? We talk about 'bonding' with people as a good thing, but bonds can be constraining too. I find this very challenging, I can see the negative aspects of this kind of love, this attachment. I don't however want to be without it. I like being attached to my friends, my family. Zen teaches us to let go of attachment, but I don't particularly want to. It seems like it's worth the risk. Maybe it is the same as 'love as a verb'. There's always a risk of being hurt, but we choose to do it because we have faith that good will come of it. (02/04/06)

Anna D: pssst, Leith! We're still on December, it's nearly March... see you at YF camp! A xx (02/22/06)