an idea of love

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 stuck by a little suction cup to a dusty window. You can love food from cake to roast beef, even those tiny individual candy bars that are never enough but just give you a taste of chocolate before you pop in the second one. One is able to love the feeling of carpet between toes or tension in a hammocks string when you lay in that 'u' position swinging delightfully with each motion of your body. We can declare love for sounds coming from a stereo, love for that particular sound wave in coordination with other sound waves that make it to the inner ear as that thing we call music. Some of us love to feel a little pain, love feeling that edge of life that lets us know we'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 or laying 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. Love is all around us, continually exuding from ourself and others. When what someone doesn't love is near, or when its something they hate 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 shying away from a certain lump of shadow, or the herding together to keep away from something strange and unknown.

We are all capable of love aren't we? When there are so many experiences yet to happen, an infinte amount or if not infinte, at the very least high enough that no one should ever have to worry about nothing new happening in their life. We can declare instant love upon sight of another person, upon hearing a brand new song, upon seeing a new collection of pixels upon a computer screen.

And 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 beats and caused "suddenly his/her heart leapt into their throat", or some such saying.

Love is also the feeling someone has for a job perhaps, for a hobby, for a lobby of a hotel that always smells just so and has plants hanging from the wall giving the illusion you had just stepped out of a dreary gray, salt-encrusted winter into a touch of the exotic. For the grip of a ball, the tension in a muscle, the throw, watching it spin just so to the exact right spot. For rolling a die and dreaming up daring adventures against ancient dragons, or of that risk of gaining or losing it all. For the woosh 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.

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.

So I ask you to love, experience this feeling throughout every nerve of your body, every electric-impulse of a brain cell, every beat of your heart.

Because that's what love is to me. Simply everything.