Love

It is tempting to equate love with sentiment. Who doesn't enjoy infatuation and sexual titillation, once these drugs are discovered during adolescent hormonal rushes? But, I have grown to see love as behavior, as a process, as a growing entity with its own life.

I believe sustaining love is planted and tended like a tree by those who love. The seed of love can be sex, sentiment, blood relationship. The sapling of love is the early discovery that comes with time and shared experience. The tree of love is the pruned and shaped understanding and dialogue which can withstand drought and storm. The fruit of love is the sense of belonging with another who knows and accepts your deepest truth.

Love is supported by commitment. It can be accelerated by sex. It is fed by communication. It is strengthened by ongoing affection. Learning to love one person deeply and completely opens the heart and mind to loving the world. Never experiencing deep love leads to mental illness and alienation from the world.

The greatest challenge of love for some is letting it into their lives. Money, role, material success and possessions are common barriers against loving and being loved. Loving requires vulnerability and sacrifice of some boundaries and barriers. It also requires the personal confidence and self-understanding to remain a whole individual while loving another completely.

Like a healthy forest, a full life contains loves of many varieties and levels of maturity. Love can be contained within a simple interaction on the street, a sprouted seed which does not grow but has life and value. Certain relationships may remain contained by business or other boundaries. The love in these relationships can grow like an elegant dwarfed bonsai, shaped by more formal manners and behaviors. Love in other relationships takes root and grows wildly from sexual passion into an ever-changing canopy of shared experience and understanding. These tall trees of long relationships lend shade and protection to new loves, planted in our lives.

The art of loving is practiced with the mind as well as with emotion. Loving is intentional behavior. Communication os essential to developing mindful love between human beings. The communication of words and the communication of physical affection have equal power. I believe any practice for human growth entails practicing the art of loving.