John Lennon told us it’s all we need. Jesus seemed to be a big fan of it, too. Hallmark gave us a holiday based around it. Poets have been using it as source of material for ages.
However, none of them have ventured an answer to what is, perhaps, an even more basic question.
“What IS love?”
A recent phase in my development has seen me examining the subject of love more closely than I have before. During the time when I was working to re-evaluate my concept of love and its place in my life, I was given a “homework assignment” of sorts, by a friend that I was discussing it with.
The idea was that, in order to do my inner work more effectively, it would be helpful to define love. The assignment was to do so, as specifically as possible. It’s easy to give real-life examples of love in action, or to describe a feeling — but that’s not really what I’m after. The actions and feelings are expressions of love — but what IS the force behind it, which we assign the label “love”?
This exercise opened up so many new areas of exploration for me that I’m now passing this homework on to my readers. 
Once I have enough answers to make for an interesting compilation that represents a range of ideas and perspectives, that will be the second part of this entry. I’ll follow that with a summary of my own thoughts on the subject, probably in a third post. Depending on how many submissions are received I may or may not be able to post them all, but if yours doesn’t get posted it doesn’t mean it wasn’t wonderful; it just means that I wanted to represent a range of ideas, not write a novel like I usually do. 
So there it is: define love, as specifically as you can. There are no wrong answers, except that I’d like the answers to avoid the inclination to give examples of how love can be expressed, such as “love is… hugging my dog.” The hugging of Rover is the expression, but what’s behind the expression that makes you want to do it in the first place? How can we describe the underlying cause that gives rise to those expressions?
Feel free to post your reply as a comment here, or email me.
Have fun with that one! In the meantime I’m making my way through a great book on personal development that I agreed to review; look for that in my next post.
–Palehorse
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- Love Vs. Control
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