What does it mean to be "love"?
"Being love means being consistent; speaking up and showing up even when scared; not wasting your time or others' when you know you can't commit to loving them in the way they need, but being upfront about it. Being love means knowing when you have the capacity to hold space for those who find "being love" to be exhausting — and then doing it — holding that space." - extract from my journal
How do we embody love when we live in a world that sells the performance of love? I say "sells" because in the love I've been shown, and have come to believe as some form of truth, there has always been a cost. One must sacrifice their time, their values, their body, their money, their personal space… all for the performance of love.
And what does that performance look like? To me, it looks like what can transform from attention to manipulation, to control, to ownership. It can appear to be abundant and supportive, but dare to shift your position in the hologram of reality even slightly and, really, this love is hollow — representative of the empty crater that lies on the surface of our sentience as living beings, constantly ringing and buzzing with the reverberation of insubstantial matter regarded as integral to the proliferation of three-dimensional reality. The performance of love can feel like the shell of love without its essential internal components. I believe that being love begins with the self, at its core truth. It begins with one clearly seeing oneself — with outer and inner eyes. It is touching every part of your body and finding comfort in your own stroke and embrace; to hazard to see yourself outside of your conditioned scope of understanding of the world and the function of people in this world. Being love is not shying away from, or neglecting, the unattractive thoughts and feelings that arise in you, threatening to dissolve the mirage of the Styrofoam reality you've had a hand in collectively creating. It is realizing that those thoughts and feelings have important messages for you, pulling you towards yourself and back under the surface for the work — real inner, healing, cleansing work; there's no need to be scared, you are protected. Being love means finding comfort and acceptance in stillness; finding comfort and acceptance in the sheer possibility of things apart from the physically manifested reality of things.
Being love in this way creates space in life. It creates moments where we can feel its fullness within and around us because we've made the time to learn its language — our individual and unique interpretations of love. In this way, when love speaks, we listen, because we've attuned our senses to its call. We've become friends with the love we've come to know as ourselves, as the unending and all-knowing force of life. When we understand what love looks and feels like, its performance becomes merely an extension of the feeling within. The performance of love becomes, then, the embodiment of love.
Something special happens when concepts become embodied. We become gods: creators and masters of universes of our own. Because concepts exist merely in the mind until we, as humans, as co-creators of multiple and simultaneous realities, give them a shot at becoming fulfilled. So, sure, love can be manifested through physical objects, or quality time, or physical affection, or acts of service, or words of affirmation — and those manifestations are beautiful unto themselves. As I move through the world and my life via my interactions with people, my imagination and curiosity begin to move beyond the material, tangible, seeable, fulfillment of this concept called love. I've now become interested in the embodiment of love in the in-between spaces of interactions with other humans. The expression of love during those touchpoints with others or during those moments when we intersect with ourselves.
And so as I reflect on the journal entry that prompted this cognition — and metacognition — I think of love as a kind of knowledge. It's that universal sense of understanding we can have with people or ideas with whom/which we have no previous relation. Love seems like that sense of ultimate connection on top of which a filter is placed; the filter of difference, separateness, fear, competition, hate. Love is the binding agent to the variegated threads of human existence, challenging us to peer inward and upward, seeing with a new kind of clarity a view of life without this filter.
My mind spins as my cells gyrate with this newly resonant understanding of the mutable abstraction of love. Just for the moment, as I sit in this unyielding wooden chair and feel the sharp edges and hardness of its material pressing against my buoyant-but-firm flesh, I allow myself to perceive the air around me as dense with the universal knowledge of love. As in any boundless body, viscous or not, it fills open crevices, permeating areas touched and untouched by the power of human consciousness. So as I imagine the air around me to be love, I consciously breathe in love, providing my physical body with a surge of existential vigor that continues to melt the filter of segregation. I move in love, swimming through the seas of life and laughter and tears, entangling myself with other bodies along my route.
And where does this route take me? Where does it take anyone? I think it takes us along the perpetual journey of love, beyond this one, uncertain lifetime, blasting through love's abstract counterparts of "time" and "space" themselves.
To be love is to be, it seems.
