Let's Talk about Love

Many of us, especially women, see love as a way to escape the drudgery of dayliness.  "Some day our prince will come" and we'll be rescued from our desks and cubicles and wisked away to perfect happiness by the side of the partner of our dreams.  Then we discover that our rescurer also needs to be rescued, and our illusions are shattered when we find just a human being by our side with the same problems, insecurities, and worries as ourselves.

That leaves us with the problem of having just one more aspect of our lives to blame for our unhappiness.
I was walking with a friend of mind who was talking about her son.  She said that he's been with his girlfriend for many years, but still doesn't think of her as "the one".  She sighed, and said that she believes that there are lots of "ones" for everybody.  She felt that if he decided she was "the one", she would become that for him.
I jokingly said that it's like Michaelangelo finding David in a block of marble.
 
Sort of, she said, but the difference is, Michaelangelo made David a perfect image of a man in marble.  You can't make someone loveable, and then love them.  You have to take the block of marble that's your heart, and find Aphrodite there. When you find love in your heart. you can love anyone.

Sure, you've chosen the person you're with and you probably have lots of reasons why you made that choice. On bad days, you can probably find just as many reasons to be annoyed or angry at the person your involved with.  One problem with that: when you love with reasons you are loving with your mind instead of your heart:  The mind changes. The heart just loves.

The question really is, can you love someone for no reason whatsoever? These are murky depths.  Negotiating them takes focus and practice.  My walk with my friend was a crash course in the emotional trickiness of love.  Then, I looked down on the trail we were hiking on and I found these:

Yep, two fish.  How weird is that?  Has to be a message from the universe!  With their inspiration, I remembered the story of the fish who didn't know what water was.  It was all around him, but since he'd always been surrounded by it, he didn't consider it a thing seperate from himself. 

I believe love for us is like water for the fish.  It's the air we breathe.  We are it, we are surrounded by it.  We make it so complicated and hard, and we think we have to seek it out for the sake of our happiness, but  we actually swim in it like the fish through water. We don't recognize it for what it truly is: our natural element. Indeed, love is what we are made of and who we are, nothing more or less than that. In order to love, all we have to do is tap into who we truly are.  We only have to find ourselves, and we'll find love.

The Dahli Lama wrote: "I love you. It's that simple". And it is that simple. Simply love.

Love, Kristine