The meaning of Love

The meaning of Love

http://adrianasassoon.wordpress.com/tag/love/

Love is synergistic

Love is perpetually reinforcing : the more we love, the more we are loved and the more we are loved, the more we love. The more each is loved by the other, the more he or she responds with increased love and vice versa.

Love is alive

Love grows like plant. It does not merely grow in us, with us, as a function of us but we grow in it, with it, as a function of it. It has a life of its own.

Love is not something for us to approach. It is something that approaches us. We do not turn it on but it turns us on as a lamplighter turns on a lamp.

Love is power

When love to us, we are not flattened but straightened, not turned off but turned on, not made passive but made active.

Love is work

Love is not passive. Love is singing a duet and that is work. Young lovers first fall in love passively, but if they are to stay in love they must actively work to keep it and grow it like a seed that is first received into the ground but then must be tended and fertilized or it will die.

We kept our love only because we worked at it. Love will not grow in modern fields without constant work. The soil is no longer rich. Perhaps the soil was never rich, but people used to be prepared to work at it. Work necessary involves sacrifice and requires patience. Your plant cannot grow any fruit without patience.

Love is bittersweet

Its very sweetness is bitter and its very bitterness is sweet.

If you love, you will suffer. The only way to protect yourself against suffering is to protect yourself against love-and that is the greatest suffering of all, loneliness. But in the very act of suffering, love can transform suffering, redeem it, and conquer it.

Only after the wilderness, after suffering, is love perfected. Not only does love transform and perfect suffering; suffering also transforms and perfects love. The two things that seem to be enemies turn out to be mutually reinforcing allies.

Love is free

There are really only three methods of influencing other people : pushing, carrying or drawing. You can use force or fear to push people where you want them to go, against their will. Or you can carry them. Then they are passive and you do the job for them, like a parent for an infant. Finally, you can draw them, attract them, motivate them to move toward you by the magnetism of desire. To be drawn is a free a choice as to draw.

Love is individual

The object of love is a person and every person is an individual. No person in a class, a species, or a collection. The lover sees the beloved not as one among many but as the center of universe; not as an ingredient but as a whole; not on the periphery of his mind’s circle but at the center.

Love conquers all

Amor vincit omnia. Like faith, love moves mountains (Mat 17:20)

-kreef,peter. Three Philosophies of Life. Ignatius press, san fransisco. 1989