Love Is…
“Love is the joy of the good, the wonder of the wise, the amazement of the gods.”
Plato
“Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against love.”
Jalal Ud-Din Rumi
My little dogs, Julie and Liza, follow me wherever I go. Right now, construction is going on in my house and a thick layer of dust coats every surface. Last night, sheetrock fumes drove me from my bedroom. I went to the basement to sleep. Julie and Liza followed me down. I made-up the bed and prepared myself for sleep with them standing at the bathroom door wearing quizzical expressions. It’s strange how you know when pets have questions, isn’t it? Julie is an old girl and a creature of habit; she knew that sleeping in the basement was not right. Liza, being young, is a little less ‘in the know’ so she just looks for opportunities to play and eat wherever we happen to be. To her, being in the basement was a lark. She brought all her slobbery toys and laid them on the bed beside me. We were on a camp-out and it was playtime!
Once I turned out the light, I heard Julie flop down with a grunt of disgust, and Liza crawled under the bed and went to sleep. Their trust is complete. They may question what I do, but as long as I do it with them, they’re happy. Now that’s love. I’ve never trusted anybody that much in my life. Unless they’re abused, pets have no barriers to love. They are unconditional. We humans are not so much.
As with everything else, the barriers to love are fear based. We may not see ourselves as loveable, we may be reluctant to be vulnerable, or we may be confused about what love really is. Especially if we grew up in a family where love and abuse, or love and neglect were bedfellows, we don’t have a good frame of reference for love.
I don’t claim to know what love is, but I know what it is not. Thomas Merton said, “The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image.” Erich Fromm wrote, “Love is union with somebody, or something, outside oneself, under the condition of retaining the separateness and integrity of one’s own self.” Love is not merging with another to such a degree that one has no separate identity, and it is not giving up one’s own life to slavishly serve another. This I know. As for what love is, I have to follow Julie and Liza’s lead on that.
Keeping the faith,
Jane
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