Imagine to Remember

The great tragedy of our world, the wickedest curse of all, is the absence of love. It seems that people can endure all matter of cruelty and loss but who can live without love? This, I am sure, must be the source from which all evils are born. There are many definitions of love, and I have yet to come across one that seems to express exactly what I am trying to say. And maybe there is no accurate definition, even the most beautiful language has its limits. If you’ve never had honey the most perfect description will not make you understand. 

What I do know for sure is that love requires that we push up against the narrow confines of the self. Children love freely because their self is still fluid and yielding. “Be ye like little children…”. Once the self becomes solidified we find ourselves in a battle between our minds and and hearts, we call this rationality. But we find ourselves still needing love yes, but scared too. All the pains and rejections can send us back into the fortress of self. And it does provide safety, but a safety that makes our words smaller, making a sad shadow of our existence. 

In her book All About Love, bell hooks explains that as a culture we do not take love seriously. We do not consider it worthy of real study, we confine it to the realm of entertainment. That’s why even in writing this I feel somehow silly, all the rambling about love is so detached from the realities of the real world. But is this “real world” nothing more than our internal realities made manifest? So is it naive to believe that some personal commitment to loving has real material effects? Because we see how the hate that burns in people’s hearts comes to pass in very real ways.