“God is Love. The Divine is Love. Have compassion for all, and love thy neighbor as yourself.”
Love, as an abstract concept, has often found itself at the heart of many religions, most of them attaining an even sharper focus in recent times. Jesus and the Buddha both follow and preach a path of love and compassion for all of the world, and all of humanity, and this is a central part of the appeal their paths have to their followers.
As such, love is at the core of humanity, and indeed most creatures’ survival, and not just in a biological sense, in which hormones, pheromones and chemicals interact to produce attraction, procreation, and the nurturing of the next generation in order for the species to survive. Without love, humanity would not have risen to the height they have today, and they would not even realize how much higher they can rise.
This naturally begs the question of what love actually is, then. To me it is a mystery, and one I have been trying to understand for many years, as an abstract concept, as a natural expectation of what it means to be human, and most recently, as an action of divinity and as a part of the living Multiverse itself.
Love, as an idea, is a current throughout my life. I’ve longed to “be in love” for as long as I can remember. Love, in fact, has haunted me. My idea of love has been built up by a long tradition of what humanity has proclaimed love to be in stories, words, and customs. Though these things cannot come from a void, for all visions of love, even the Disney princess “happily ever after” love, fill the human heart, and mind, and soul, our idea of love and “being in love” spirals out of control sometimes, and we misunderstand it or expect it to be something which, all too often, is not what it really is.
Here, we must also consider what is the difference between love and compassion. Some take the meaning of love to be more selective and isolated, whereas compassion is something more universal and unrestricted. In my eyes, there is only a subtle difference between the two: compassion is indeed universal, and love is indeed more selective, but they are currents (if you will) of the same basic force of divinity that runs through the universe. To return to the Fire at the Heart of the World and the Pearl, briefly, compassion is that Fire that runs through the universe, and love is a manifestation of that Fire as a Pearl.
Despite this, it is difficult for me to understand what it means to love, and to be loved, sometimes. It is difficult for me to reconcile my knowledge that love may be nothing more than firings of my brain synapses, and my belief that love and compassion is part of the mystery that makes the entire multiverse Divine.
But recently I have come to realize something about love. Love is not only a state of mind, chemical interaction or the foundation of the universe; love, and the act of compassion, is just that: an action, a constant, present movement not of “being in love” but “loving”. It is strange how long it has taken for my eyes to open up to this truth of love. I have lusted after certain ideals, only to find them shattered time and time again. For instance, I have long been hung up over the idea that I had no real friends or relationships because time and time again I found myself feeling isolated and not a part of any welcoming network or support system.
However, when I started to focus, and when I started to open my heart to the idea that love is not just a river you drift in, but one you have to swim in, that I must love without worrying about being loved back, I realized something: I do have friends, and I am very much loved, and, most importantly, I have a great many people I love back.
Love and compassion are part of the Divinity of the multiverse, and indeed, are perhaps the prime forces that create so much of the beauty we find herein. To love is to act, to participate in the divinity of the multiverse, and to create even more beauty. And is that not really the essence of poetry? Is that not the duty of the fíle?
Holding love and compassion in your heart for the people in your life, for the stories you tell, for the world you stand in, is to hold one of the mightiest sources of power a Poet can have. It is not enough to seek truth: what would the truth be if you could not use it to preserve or understand something you love? And it is not enough to merely expect to be in love: you must love. You must be love itself.
