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Several days have been
spent contemplating the nature of love. First, it began with a
celebration
of the fact that I have the incredible gift of having people who I love
and who
love me. Just this realization is glorious enough. Then it
progressed to analyzing what love actually means. Using my mother
for an
example, it struck me that I do not want her to change at all, to just
have her
go on being her. In many ways this mirrored my experience working
with
thought and circumstance in my own life, where intimacy and love of
existence
are present whenever there is no struggle to make things different from
how
they are. The notion then expanded to include myself, and it hit
me like
a ton of bricks how often I am looking to change something about myself
- make
myself feel different, act more courageously, live more
compassionately, have a
smaller bald spot. This directly gets in the way of me loving
myself, of
the process of self-acceptance and self-love seems so tantamount.
That feeling lasted no more than 10 seconds before the idea slammed me
square
in the face - what if there was no me to love? No I to love
me. If
the whole process just ceased. What was left over was a naked,
unadulterated feeling of everything being OK just as it is, no need to
change
or make different at all. All that was left over was love.
Without
anything doing the loving or anything being loved. Just the love
remained.