Trying to Define Love

What is love?  What means this over-used word?  When we analyze what it is or wonder what has it become, we can further wonder what it should or could ever be besides.  Hopefully, we can at some point say what it will be or mean in relation to us.  It has been used to mean any number of things, some of which are innocuous enough to forego any real meaning or value.

It is applied indiscriminately to a number of things and feelings, perhaps because they at least in part share in what love is.  In so doing, we may detract from what love more truly is, if it is something that can be detracted from.  It is physical and so is shared with other physical beings, giving it an animal quality (which is not a bad thing to have).  It is also emotional, felt within our souls, as much as in our bodies and probably even more.  It has a reasonableness beyond reason, seeming so right and true as to be beyond question.  It is intuitive, but not unreasonable or irrational.  The reality or presence of love can encompass, or at least influence, all other facts of being.

Love is part of everything that is and without it we could never be who we might become.  Sometimes it is much more than just a part of everything, and then it is all of everything, and more.  It is as present in silence as it is in the exuberance of its newness.

It is not mawkish, though sentimental it surely is.  It lacks the harmlessness some would attach to its purity and noble aspect.  It would not be were it an ideal detached from the lives of living people.  Its implications can occasion fear as easily as it offers security in which we might wrap ourselves away from so much we might otherwise dread.  It belongs to and completes people of all ages as it seeps beyond borders or nationality, sex, tradition, and any other gradation or distinction we might offer.  But, this does not answer the question of what it is or what love might be all about.  What is the meaning; where is the definition?  Maybe, there is none.

Maybe love, like us, simply is.  Perhaps this universal feeling and awareness is at the same time too individual a thing to entertain generalization.  It could simply be another of those realities that will not live in our attempts at definition or description.  Does it suffice to say it must be felt, experienced and most of all shared, before it can become more than what we would call it?  Probably so, since it is alive and its life can be only to one who loves.  Maybe we can only be it, but never will define it.