LOVE

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~ as written by Linda Kavelin Popov
Virtues Project Reflection Cards

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MY TWO SENSE:

When John Lennon sang, "All we need is love." did he know how close to the truth he was? Or was he simply singing lyrics that were true to his heart at the time? Well my friends, Love is really what we truly need. Love is within us and love is around us. We can reject it, we can embrace it, we can grow in its presence and we can shrink from the lack of it. Love is perfect in it's design. It can be pregnant and empty. It's ethereal, in that it is not something you can touch or hold, it is subtle and intangible. It is pure and Heavenly but yet it can be Hell. We can hunger for it and consequently, be broken by it. We can move in and through love like miners, carefully inspecting, cracking open and pushing our way through the substance in order to determine it's purity, it's rarity, it's worth. Even then, we move from place to place not really knowing what we are searching for. Our hearts know though, don't they? Our heart knows when true love is present, or not. The heart knows. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, "You are not a human being in search of a spiritual experience. You are a spiritual being immersed in a human experience." I believe that if we pare a human down to the very essence, love will be all there is to measure. 

What is life for but to collect and distribute love through the maze that we call living? I believe that nothing else matters. We humans have created a whole system of distractions that can keep us so focused on the day to day dealings that we have little time to focus on love. Even though our hearts can become stressed through the haste & noisy confusion of just living - don't lose hope. We live in very exciting times and man is on the frontier of understanding how & why stress can rob us of our life, our health, our happiness. We're on the cutting edge of awareness & the theory that stress is caused when our heart goes against what LOVE wants us to do, or when we are faced with situations that are not (from love). Medical science knows that stress compromises our autonomic and central nervous systems, which powers our immune system, which can manifest imbalances in our body, and that means different problems for different people. 

At my job in a long term care facility, I have many conversations with residents about the measure of a man and what is really important. At the end of their days this question may be all that they want to reflect upon, or it may be what haunts them. It is a true & rare gift of the heart to realize the value of this message early. To die knowing the depth of our love and the positive effect of touching others love is a lesson I choose to carry with me every minute of every day. How I love is all that matters. The relationships I choose provide a stage for the lessons which I must love through. The issues in life that challenge and empower, serve me to acquire the ultimate lesson - which is about the whole process of loving each other and myself through the peaks and valleys of everyday living. A wise old man once told me, "When you get to the end of your life, it's not your social status, your job or what you acquired that matters -- it's how you moved through pain." When we trust, share and openly express the love we have for ourselves and one-another, we can face and move through anything. 

It's all about the love!