Love

I have been thinking, dear reader.  Grief is still extremely present in my life and deeply painful.  I am broken, and have felt what it means to sorrow because of love.  Yet, grief is becoming less overwhelming and I have been thinking about love.  To me, these two are companions; you do not have one without the other.  "For it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things.  If not so...righteousness could not be brought to pass, neither wickedness, neither holiness nor misery, neither good nor bad. Wherefore, all things must needs be a compound in one" (2 Nephi 2:11).

I love how holiness and misery are paired, and they struck me as sort of an odd match.  To think that holiness and misery could be the opposites of each other encouraged me to adopt the idea that love could have an opposite that was not hatred.  I feel that the opposite to love, sometimes, is grief.  And with that in mind, I wanted to write a companion piece to my thoughts on grief.  Both of these experiences are powerful and transformative, and together they make one.   

Love is white. Pure, endless, ubiquitous but often unassuming and unnoticed.  Ordinary and yet transcendent.  As one writer puts it, "it makes no sense because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal".  It is earthy and holy at the same time.  It blends with any color, because love is not exclusive; it is the most inclusive gift, infinitely, graciously giving and endless in supply.  

Love is just as ubiquitous as grief.  But while grief is slippery and amorphous, love is steady and constant.  Its effects are just as varied as grief's, and just as intense.  They match each other.  Love sometimes brings such lightness that I feel I have lost touch with the world.  Other times it is grounding, giving such security and hope that I feel anything is possible.  Carrying love is difficult because it often carries me.  

Sometimes love impels me to run, but not to escape.  It impels me to run for joy, for thrill, and for others.  To be close to others, to be there for others.  Sometimes love still brings my heart to where it pleads to burst, only to be able to carry and share and hold and express and enact more love for others.  Oh, how it is achingly beautiful.  

I am not sure if I have ever been rendered immovable by love.  Surely it is a fixating point, but it enlivens and ennobles and emboldens to such a degree that standing still hardly seems like a possibility.  Yet, I imagine there are times where love requires us to stand still, to be witness more than participant and to rejoice in what we see and experience.  

Love can be all encompassing, all consuming.  Yet rather than empty me in its consumption, it motivates me to give, to withhold nothing, and to do the impossible.  It keeps me present, though perhaps sometimes distracts me with its force.  

Love is not without tears.  Tears given from love are often quiet ones that make our eyes glisten and communicate our hearts when words cannot.    

Love is tingly, fizzy like soda, bubbling through my body with excitement.  Love engenders smiles and laughter, glances and gazes, blushes and gasps.  It requires honesty to grow and thrives with vulnerable exposure.  

Love is sweet, though gently so.  Like grief, it is not overpowering.  Love graces all that I smell and taste and see and hear and touch, clarifying and lending beauty to it all.  Love is radiant and clear.  

Love sounds glorious.  At times it is silent, at times boisterous in words and laughter, and all the time present.  One poet says that "Attention is the beginning of devotion".  Love pays attention, dear one, and is always in the present moment.  

So though choosing love means choosing grief, I choose love.  It is such a gift, dear reader.  To choose to carry love with you is to be unafraid, to rejoice, to hope.  That choice is also one to grieve, to weep, and to mourn.  It is wonderfully simple and gloriously complex all at once.  Experiencing both gives substance to our existence and while I would not choose both, I am glad that we cannot have one without the other.