Love Languages

Who can really define love?

Is it really even a feeling? More like a force of nature in my opinion. Like a universal force, capable of changing it's shape to suit the container that would seek to house it. Like water, hot or cold, still or coursing, love can be many things and still be love. When love moves through us, it changes us, it motivates us to change.

Brother's can love each other and then fight each other for a woman, a woman that they also love. Love can grow from the love we feel for our mothers to the love we feel for our nation, or for our people, or for the world. Will we always feel love the way we did when we were teenagers? That love would burn the world down. Last month many celebrated Martin Luther King Jr. Day. This man died out for love, in a sense.

We don't know what is, we can only try to be with it. The mystic sufi's would devote their lives to a universal love. Among many other insightful and thought provoking observations, the French obstetrician Michel Odent postulates that no love can come without pain (referencing interesting experiments to back that up http://www.lalecheleague.org/llleaderweb/lv/lvaprmay02p40.html).

One thing I have noticed about love is that it does speak a language. I like Dr. Gary Chapman's simplifications here. He references five specific languages here: words of affirmation, quality time, giving and receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch (http://www.5lovelanguages.com). In this formulation individuals may give in one or two love languages, but prefer receiving in another. Furthermore the intended recipient of your love may therefore 'hear' in one love language, while 'speaking' in another.

I view these as handy cliff notes on habits and/or predispositions in the loving mode. Language contains ideas, but also emotion, and energy. Love need not be the only emotion presented here. To a cynical mind, the five languages of love could just as easily become the five languages of manipulations and management. So there is no love without sincerity. We either make room for it to change us, or we do not.

In a sense it doesn't matter how you speak or hear love, as long as you value it, and can awaken to it. I find that it can be very difficult to relate to a force of nature. I find that people must behave willingly, courageously, humbly, insistently, yieldingly. They must hold questions and paradoxes. Following love might as well be the same as following the Tao.

I know and love a good many social critics and cynics who denigrate Valentine's Day as contributing to the vapid consumerist enterprises that dominates so much of what we recognize as our American culture. I see that argument, and I can see the needless pressures and false idols it creates. And yet in America, and all around the world, the hopeless romantics, and the more serious devotees of love, have a full day that cannot be ignored.

Ideally we would love each other every day, but this day is collective. We can all be on board. Collective energy is a huge thing. People maybe don't think about it much anymore.

A recap on the way we show our love, for february