Love...

I wanted to write about love but I realised that I no more understand the complexities of love then I do of life. The raw emotions that we feel, the ones that cannot be verbalised because they exist only to us, to try and explain them to another can feel rather daunting, unexplainable even. There are no words that can convey the gravity of what love is to each person. I know what love is to me, although I may not be able to express it adequately in words, I feel it right at the centre of my being every time I look at a person that I love. However I cannot be sure that what I feel is the same as what any other person feels even though the sub-text may appear the same at times.

The prophet, Kihlil Gibran wrote “as love crowns you so shall he crucify you. Even as he ascends to your heights and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun so shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.” And this is what love has taught me. At it's height you can feel no greater elation, it will lift you up and beyond any kind of happiness you ever thought possible. However when love crucifies you it does it in such a way that you feel torn apart from yourself, the enormity of pain that it can inflict on you is devastating. So much so that sometimes you feel you may never recover. Sadly some people, broken hearted, never do...I know no other emotion (if you can categories love as an emotion) that has the potential to do this to you. No other emotion that has the power to propel you into the stratosphere one moment and slam you hard and cold back to earth and bury you deep the next.

Love comes in many forms for different people but as my blog is about my experiences as a parent then I must talk about my love for Emily I guess. The love you feel for your child is an all encompassing thing. It surrounds you and makes you weak and vulnerable and (only speaking from personal experience now) it is unmatched in power to that which you feel for any other. My love for Emily is fierce and unrelenting, it is all consuming and self-sacrificing. It keeps me going when I want to give up and forces me onward, everyday, even when I feel like I have nothing left to give. It terrifies me because it exists in a place I have no control over and is rooted deep in the centre of who I am. I cannot hide my heart from her, like I have done with so many other people in my life, not that I would want to of course but it is truly humbling to love so profoundly and without question. I never got it before. All those years when my own mother would look at me with genuine love in her eyes no matter what I might be telling her or what I might have done. I didn't understand that it could be possible to value another person's life more than your own but now I understand.

So maybe love is so complex because the nature of love is unfounded. We do not know where it comes from, or what controls it. We only know how it feels to us and I guess that is all we can really understand about it or maybe that is all I can ever understand.

Just a few late night thoughts...