All About Love

The older I get the more I believe that this life we live is

All About Love

in one way or another.

Love is the simplest word to speak and maybe one of the hardest ones to act. In this week when many celebrate Valentine’s Day, I am thinking a lot about love and loss and the why of it all. There is a huge difference between falling in love and simply being in love, or even more simply being love.

Grief is a natural part of loving someone or something deeply. Whether that love is for a spouse, child, pet, friend, place, or thing, we wouldn’t grieve the loss or pain of the loved one unless we loved so deeply. Perhaps if I understood love more deeply still I would realize that one can never truly lose the person or thing that we love, that the loved one goes on in an infinite number of ways.

Love is a Verb, not a Thing

Instead of showing love through buying presents or cards, are there other ways to express love? My answer to that is an emphatic “Yes!” And maybe the word “showing” is the wrong word to pair with the word love. Maybe the word to pair with love is “being.” How can I be love now, and now, and again now?

At my age I am far more interested in simply Being Love instead of Being In Love or showing love. The question I am learning to ask myself more and more is simply,  “What would love do now…and now…and now?” with whatever is happening in the world around me. And though I often stumble and fail in my efforts to be love, my work, including my photography, is a work of being love in my own perfectly imperfect way.

Lord, the shadowed world
is full of troubles.
So give me the good,
inconvenient work of love.

Link my life to others
so that their worries
become my own.
Give me errands I don’t want
which ease the burdens of others.
Divert me from the plans I’ve made
to zip from A to B
when you have better ideas.
Put my hands to work
with a less-grumbling heart
and let their dreams drift into my own.

You’ve given me tools to use
and ideas to fashion
that will bring me neither recognition,
nor money, nor praise.

You’ve made love such a sneaky thing.
The more we love as you do,
the less we are keeping track of it at all.

   — Kate Bowler, Have a Beautiful Terrible Day

Wishing you a week of being love in this troubled world we live in.

May you walk in beauty.

Note about today’s photos: Sketch images I made in response to a prompt to go out and make a simple sketch image, then make two more to go with it. I did the exercise twice using ICM (intentional camera movement) because I found it so interesting.