What is love?

One can love a sister,
a brother,
a mother,
a father,
grand's of the two latters,
uncles and aunts, cousins and friends, strangers, pets,
the sunlight on a warm evening reflecting through a prism held by fishing line which is itself stuck to a little suction cup against a dusty window.

One can love food from cake to broccoli to fried fish to those tiny individual candy bars that are never enough but give just a taste of chocolate before “pop” in goes the second one. One is able to love the feeling of carpet between toes or the tension in a hammock’s string when lying in that 'u' position swinging delightfully with each motion.

We can declare love for that particular sound wave in coordination with other sound waves that crash into the inner ear resulting in that thing we call music.  Some love to feel a little pain, love feeling that edge of life that lets one know they're alive. Nerves tingling with the sensation that something is not quite right, mind ablaze with the knowledge that the power to commit more pain or to stop it is in grasp.

One might love a particular spot in the world, a city, a hill, a nook, a field of sunflowers swaying in the breeze. From flying an airplane at sound-breaking speeds to lying near comatose, the only movement the flipping of pages and the flitting of eyes as words are dragged into a brain to organize, recognize, and realize their meaning in correlation to each other.

We are all capable of love aren't we? There are so many experiences yet to happen, an infinite amount or if not infinite, at the very least high enough that no one should ever have to worry about nothing new happening in their life. For we can declare instant love upon sight of the person just about to turn the corner, upon hearing a brand new song from some accidental exposure to an unfamiliar radio channel, upon seeing a new collection of pixels upon a computer screen.

So many are interested in making love, loving that lustful feeling, that connection with another person's soul, the grunting, sweaty, eye-squinting experience, or maybe just the arms of the other wrapped around the body to feel that person's heart beating next to that vein in the neck that causes "suddenly his/her heart leapt into their throat", or some such saying.

Is love the feeling someone has for a job perhaps, for the lobby of a hotel one might serve in that always smells just so.  With plants hanging from each wall lending the illusion of stepping out of a dreary gray, salt-encrusted winter into a touch of the exotic. Or for a hobby, for the grip of a ball, the tension in a muscle, the throw, watching it spin just so, to the exact right spot.

Love may come from rolling a die and dreaming up daring adventures against ancient dragons, or from the unknown risk of gaining or losing it all. For the whoosh of air in free fall from 10,000 feet, or the watery embrace of sea exploring. For healing a sick child, for holding a kite string as it plays upon a wind we've no control over. For simply placing one foot in front of the other, for drinking with a group of friends and laughing at things that'll never be thought of again but seem so intelligent at the time.

Love is all around, in growing globes continually exuding from things and self and others. When what someone does not love is near, we are quick to learn it. The disgust in the face as a lump of food falls out of the mouth that tried something new or something forgotten. The act of shying away from a certain lump of shadow, or herding together in an effort to keep away from something strange and unknown.  They’re spaces of lack, of something missing, or of too much of something being there.  Like too much pepper on potatoes, or not enough to suit auto-condimenting tastes.

But that gives evidence of different levels of love, of too much or not enough, of over-excited aunts smothering or no one writing.  Of five favorite colors mixing together to create something drab, gooey, or somehow wrong.  Or a black and white rainbow hanging in the television’s sky.  Of sometimes the sum being less than its parts, instead of more.  But this too, this too has love within it.  The aunt over come by it.  The artist hoping to show it.  The television bringing a lovable sight as best as what could be had.

What can love not be? Maybe that is the closest we will ever be to knowing what love is. Because if love cannot be a certain things...to anyone...then love must simply be everything else. For one, a “scritch” of fingernails across green blackboard is a loathsome, marrow scraping experience.  For others it is the drunken footsteps upon a staircase pounding higher and higher, agonizingly closer and closer to the bedroom door. Maybe being touched on the nose or those little prickly seeds that hold on like Velcro to anything they touch.  At the same time another could love those little spiky balls, or enjoy owning drunken feet, the world a blur with head so heavy.  Love is so ready to include, that anyone is hard-pressed to find something the world excludes and places in a bin called "hate".

Is love always, in that unfortunate black or white way of looking at things, good? Again how it is viewed comes into play.  A homicidal person, disturbed in ways we know not how, might view their acts, as ones brought on by love.  Don’t psychologists say, “He wasn’t loved enough as a child” or “his parent’s didn’t show him love.”  And descriptions of such an act can be put into song and embraced, or else, who are musicians from Nick Cave to Johnny Cash to Sammy Davis Jr. to have songs like “O’Malley’s Bar,” “Bang Bang,” or lyrics as, “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”  For that matter, what of the oh so numerous films celebrated throughout the years, with the death of a character being a central point of plot, or the death of a villain cheered by the crowd, whether theater’s large or home’s small.

War often has both parties fighting for a cause, a piece of ground, a belief, their families; all things that they love.  We can all agree that genocide is brought about by hating another group or race too much, right?  And as much we profess that we cannot understand the people killing, what brought about their hate?  Did it spring from their reaction to the other, or from tough, difficult, near impossible times, where they misplaced their love, where when seeking some answer, the wrong one was found?  And why do they seek an answer?  What brings about the need to know “Why?” when survival is all we can do? Because, maybe, survival, as a species, as normal human beings, as communities, maybe that survival needs something more.  As corny and well-trodden as it is, can that “something more” simply be something, someone, somewhere, someway to love?

So I ask you to live in your loves, to experience this feeling throughout every nerve of your body, every electric-impulse of a brain cell, every beat of your heart and blink of the eye.

Because what is love?