the meaning of love

note: i've been talking a lot w friends about my current situation lately (for that, reference: a broken heart), and i decided to put them into this post. ordinarily, i wouldn't lift entire passages from e-mails i've written to them (privacy thing, you know...and sorry guys, hope you don't mind), but i figured this kind of brings up a major purpose behind this blog and my writing...that, and it expresses my sentiments in a way i like--and remember: i keep telling everyone that i'm about as profane a person writing about the sacred as you're ever likely to meet. this pretty much displays what i mean. and it's pretty much who i am.

i used to be pretty idealistic in my youth. all full of ideals about things like truth and freedom and life and mortality and immortality and eternity and god and humanity and beauty and love. especially love. i used to think it was so special. because it was so mysterious, so seemingly irrelevant to existence, but yet so compelling, and incredible in how it gave our lives meaning. it preoccupied a lot of my time.

but somewhere along the way, things changed. i've gotten more realistic about things as i've gotten older. i guess people have to be in dealing with the mundane bullshit of living and paying bills. love and eternity and god and immortality kind of get lost sometimes in the crush of papers and deadlines and work and survival.

i'm not the only one. many of my friends feel the same way. a lot of them, in fact, say they've even started to give up on love. because there just doesn't seem to be any room for it in this life--or any other.

it's cause quite a bit of soul-searching on my part. and not just because of what's happened to me recently (although, that definitely did aggravate the situation). but i've given it some thought, and here's what i think:

i still believe...still need...love. because life is not just a science, but also an art. or it should be. because otherwise it's just an utter waste of time in the vast scale of the cosmos--and yeah i know it is, but for all that there is this one undeniable truth: it is profound. because it is. the same way that the ancients described god as "i am that i am".

and in order to know just how profound, we have to see life in its totality...or as much as we can within the limited confines of our own selves.

and part of that totality is love.

which is why i think it's special whenever you find someone else who gets it. because there's not too many of us around. we have to understand the value of love, and have to know how to respect it (and i don't mean just the other person; i mean life itself).

and we have to know that anytime you find someone who can help you see--and better yet, aspire to reach--the greater things in this universe, you better hang on to them with both hands as hard as you can, so that your mortality can become something beautiful (as opposed to just mundane bullshit), and your life can become sacred (as opposed to just profane).

because we are art. we are profound. and not respecting that is an insult to everything divine.

and in the end--the end, as all things end--it's all we have.

that is why we don't give up on love. because without that, there is no hope.

and with no hope, there is no life.

and what's the point of that?

(or at least no life beyond the muck and mire of human misery. which sucks. i'm tired of sucks. my grandfather said this: you have stop looking for things worth dying for, and start looking for things worth living for. my grandmother said this: survival isn't enough, you also have to flourish.--but for either one you need to believe in life, hope, and love...you need to have faith).

life. hope. love.

once we realize this, we're a little closer to art. a little closer to profound. a little closer to everything that is great and mysterious and beautiful and wonderful and holy and sacred in this universe, and a little closer to the divine truths that we were placed in this creation to discover, so that it could be made known and manifest to all the denizens in all the realms of eternity...as light exploding into brilliance--dazzling, radiant, glorious--for the very first time to banish all the reaches of the darkness.

a little closer to art. a little closer to profound. a little closer to god.