Love is energy
...neither created nor destroyed, only transformed
I have a lot of words about love. Strange, sometimes, because love can feel indescribable and beyond mere language. Perhaps that’s why we try so hard to capture it with poetry. It’s a big reason why I practice creating poetry.
Like poetry, love can be a practice. But first: know that love is energy that simply is. Love flows within us, around us, through time and distance. Love changes that which it touches. Love transforms as a result of touching those that allow it.
Love as energy is different from the practice of love. To practice love is to accept wholeness. To allow what is. Humans struggle with this. We fear pain and discomfort and that makes the practice of love through difficulty oh so daunting. Feeling daunted is okay. To practice implies there will be stumbles, setbacks, the feeling of failure. There is no practice makes perfect. There’s just practice. If we allow ourselves to be transformed yet humble, our practice gets better as we painfully—and gently—grow through old patterns. We remember that kindness is how our practice of love thrives.
Getting love feels so important. It can feel like we need to get love to be ourselves. It can be hard for me to remember that we ARE ourselves always—whole, messy, and already able to be with love. I forget this. We all do. Because it feels special to get love… we’ve all felt this.
“It’s remarkable how relationships change when you approach them FROM love instead of trying to get love” - Ram Dass
Approaching relationship FROM love… ah, what an incredible state to practice. Approaching one’s existence in the world with love? Yes, that too.
Don’t you feel it? The gravitational pull to big energy fields. Bigger! Practicing romantic love with more than one person has stretched me into a bewildering existence. One full of expansion, joy, risk, and the pain of loss. And that is where the nowness and persistence of love as energy, runs right into the weeds of the practice.
I try so hard to approach FROM love. I try to remember my incredible wholeness and radiance. And when I stumble, I fall back into feeling like I have “gotten” love that then was taken away. That love was outside me as a goal or a possession, instead of within me waiting for ME to see it (and perhaps for another to see it, too… but not to give it to me). This is the practice, my loves.
Love will transform you, me, itself. How we gently hold it, how much kindness we can bring to our energy, is up to each of us.