Ninety Six Words for Love

Love is a movement and is a dynamic force that melts down barriers and boundaries.  Love dissolves separateness.  Love is more or less my degree of being present and more or less my contact with the Other.  At times I have clarity and a transparent Presence.   Then there are times of reactivity and mechanical thinking.  There are other times I have deep self-alienation, suffering and even my own self-destructiveness.  Love is this movement is between my inner essence and my ego personality.  Love is a yardstick of my consciousness and is everything in between.  Love to me, therefore, is expressed in many different words and these words are only a signpost.  The whole flow of love is our words and is one enormous creative dance.  I feel to put words on love could make it static, when actually love is dynamic force that melts down barriers and boundaries.  The difficulty is I can imagine myself to be very different from how I actually am and putting words on this is the unfolding of this dynamic dance.  Love she creates and sustains, saying we are all in this dance and is the significance of your presence.        
  

 Syd's description feels....lovely. 

 I developed a vocabulary and ease of expressing love and all feelings and needs when studying the Nonviolent Communication tools developed by Marshall Rosenberg. I life is richer for the freedom I feel using them and more intimate as a result. 

Gail, nonviolent communication is genuine strength and is the powerful force of love.   I thank you deeply for your powerful force, love itself.      

 Dina, your feelings appear to be your value, a special value as person, and a energy of somethng special about you.  

 Maybe our words are inadequate in describing love. When I think of my daughter, there really are no words intense enough to describe my love for her. Unconditional and internal come the closest. Love for my mother and to my mother are hard to put in words, too. Nurturing, all enveloping. How we feel and express love isn't limited by words, only actions. 

 Re-reading your comments, and others' have to add that infants and newborns express some of the most profound and pure love there is and they can't speak!  Likewise people are often more emotionally attached to their pets than people.  Wordless, unconditional adoration.  Do they know at some level love is what they are?  When did we forget?  Is one word maybe too much?

 Sandra, you speak of infants and newborns expressing pure love.  You ask, “Do they know on some level love is what they are?”  It seems to me we are all created and born in the Garden of Eden, where we have the essential qualities of the heart.  We appear to lose these essential qualities of the heart by falling away from our awareness and presence.  It is like we fall away from our inner Essence and into the trance of our personality.  For me personally, my parents nurtured me erratically and I did not feel a dependable source of love and assurance.  When I realized my value was“nothingness” I felt holes in my soul and I even look at my body to see if I had holes.  This sense of having holes and a vacuum from within made my human nature fight, as human nature abhors a vacuum. 
 
We all experience this “nothingness,” the vacuum and this inner void to some degree in childhood.   It feels like the sky is falling to a small child.  This creates anxiety, the fear of separation, and how we respond to this inner anxiety is different for each of us.  There are also patterns that are common to all of us, because fear is insecurity, this inner doubt.  We all experience the fear of abandonment. There seems to be a point fear creates faithlessness and this appears to make us lose our inner Essence.  It is the point where self-possession and self-surrender are taken away, deep painful anxiety.    
 
Pride seems to be the most common response to this anxiety and this inner void.  Pride is denial and it is the ability to endure whatever is happening by tuning out.  It is like our feelings become fatalistic, as we may feel nothing can be done to change things and in any event whatever is the problem, it is not much a problem after all.  Pride can also become vainglory, satisfaction in what I am good at and satisfaction in my virtue. Pride, though, is a fundamental denial of my loss of contact with Essence and is particularly the loss of contact with qualities of real love. 
 
We never really lose our inner Essence if we all could be really present and awake, where our identity and self-worth do not arise.  Our Beingness does not depend on sustaining our identity in activity.  And yet to have no purpose and this place of no accomplishment, God or Essence, creates feelings of this Being is a dirty rat. Faith becomes mean, complex and exhausting, nothing true ore valuable to believe in.  The fall is into self-consciousness and alienation.  The fall can also paradoxically allow us to fall into our deeper self, this inner Essence.  It feels like falling back into faith, this inner Essence where there is union which appears to create enormous dignity and self-respect without the faintest whiff of egocentricity.  It feels like just a place to begin. 
 
Unity is before the Fall and unity comes back to us in the Fall.  The Fall is part of nature’s ways and it seems we all have to find our peacefulness or faith in this natural order of things.  Faith is created in the Fall, as we learn to not be defiant and learning to yield ourselves to it.  Falling back into this Garden of Eden, our inner Essence, is mean because there is no clinging to any ideas.  Faith seems to discover this ability to keep an open mind, falling into a higher state and making all our experiences, even the pain, into something beautiful: faith hope and love. 
 
Maybe one word is too much, even the word God, because my mind ricochets from one psychological state to another from this word.  So it seems faith becomes its own value and literally has no reference to anyone, as our identity IS.                    
 
 
 
                       

 HI Syd,
I must be more care-full of my comments.  I was writing a bit rhetorically, in a sense, knowing the answers.  Though we all have different paths and then different terms, etc.  So some of your language may not be clear to me.  But I was only adding to the conversation that love is naturally expressed with or without language.  Words don't stop us from feeling, recognizing the love from babies, pets, even adults.  From the divinity within.  I'm "aware" that entrance into the illusion called material life, we initially retain some of our spiritual understanding, and "time" causes it to fade, somewhat.  But, it's never really gone.  Prayer and meditation, whatever your path, brings it to the surface, for in fact, we've never left heaven.  Just seems that way.
Anyway, lest I be guilty of contradicting myself, probably should end my "word" contributions to this inspiring thread.  We all get it at some level!!
Cheers!
P.S.  So are you a kind of "official" contributer to this blog?  A spiritual teacher/leader I don't know about yet?

 I had a sense your questions were just adding to the conversation and I could have left it there.  Writing just gives me the key to see the whole, as I am home bound.  I have a cell disease, mitochondria specifically.  Mitochondria are parts of the cells that combine the calories we consume with the oxygen and turn this combination into energy which runs everything in our body.  My mitochondria are shot which makes my body function with a constant exhaustion.  It is like climbing a steep hill and you cannot take another step.  Social life is extremely exhausting and from there I have no ability to think, to feel, or to do.  My mental connections go haywire.  The craziness is insane.  So I write sorting out my thoughts and also trying to create this opening to no longer hold onto my ideas.  This is to say, I have no faith in my body, dragging along, and writing helps me keep an open mind.  It helps my faith live in faithlessness.  I am also no official contributor, as I am just allowing myself acquire a new depth.  My disease is only eight years old, this is all new, even my faith from within, which is trying to learn to live without reference to anyone.  It feels impossible to have a faith without reference to anyone and then again everything is also beyond me.

I may be out of step here, and then on-the-other-hand contemplation is a sense of wonder.  I have not completely learn how to contemplate quietly, so writing is my key for now, and helps me observe my faith.  The present is enough and allowing my faith to fall into it is another thing, so I write for this realistic faith.

I appreciate you being honest with me, even if we misunderstood each other.  Your presence is significant!                     

 Thanks for sharing, although you may have already done so before I started participating.  Good you've found this outlet in writing.  Don't know what your spiritual studies include and I don't need to know, but I hope some of them have "suggested" illness can be healed metaphysically, prayerfully, through meditation, etc.  I've seen the benefits, but it's an individual preference.  Happens when we want it, accept it.  None of us has any clue the degree to which we are loved too much to go through any trials.

Keep writing and sharing and learning and growing!!  You are blessed.