Love

We all spend a lot of time preoccupied with it, and rightly so. It's come up this week in many of conversations with my friends. One friend is going through the torture of love unrequited, another is going through difficult times in a marriage, a third has just fallen in love and is glowing with it, and yet another friend is expecting a baby this week, and she is euphoric. I wondered what the search engines would say if I typed in just "Love" —

1. The top result on Google is the Wikipedia entry, which attempts a thorough examination and explanation of what "Love" means. Impossible, of course, but a nice try.

2. The second is Love Calculator, which pretends to calculate the love match potential of any two people by their first and last names. YYYYEEEAAAHH.

3. On AltaVista, the third result is the comic "Love Is", which I remember being my mom and dad's favorite when I was little. They would leave each other little love notes, by putting a "Love Is" comic in the other person's purse or jacket pocket, or leave one on the table if the other person came home late. Apparently this website posts one a day.


4. On image searches, just typing in "Love" brings up thousands of regular people whom other thousands of regular people love, as well as puppies, kittens, babies, and so forth.


Who really knows what love is. It's one of the Unquantifiables—we don't know how to define it, but we know it when we feel it towards someone or something, we all desire it, and we feel its loss keener than anything else.

I like what Kahlil Gibran wrote about love in "The Prophet":

Think not you can direct the course of Love; Love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Love has no other desire but to realize itself. But if you love and must desire something, let these be your desires:

To melt and be like the running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your realization of Love and to bleed willingly and with joy.
To wake at dawn with a wingèd heart and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at noontide and meditate on Love's ecstasy;
To return home in the evening with gratitude; And then,
To sleep with a prayer for the Beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.

Wishing you all much love in your lives,
Anniina

P.S. This was that post I said I was contemplating not posting, for its potential "lameness" — but since y'all so kindly said you didn't mind my being lame, I figured I'd publish it after all. ~A.