Love is the separation of duty from voluntary action. Love is choice. Love is looking at another and saying “I choose you.” Not just “I do this because I must” or “Because I cannot see any other way to live my life right now.” Love is “I make time for you.” Love is “I give up for you.” Love is sacrifice. Love is voluntarism in action. Love is discipline, and care and concern. Love is truth and justice at once. Love is to see the good and seek out the bad. To observe, not ignore. not to justify, either, those things which are wrong – but to admit the wrongness – to realize the wrongness – to acknowledge the deficiency and to wait for it. Love is to send one’s heart into the abyss, not knowing whether it will return, but whether or not it does is not the issue. The issue is the sending out – the excessing – the exuding – the extruding – of the things which once held us back and yet now free us to greater exploration of self.

Love is inspiration. Love is adoration. Love is trepidation and apprehension. Love is to hope and fear; to hope for good, to fear that same good. For how unlikely is it that both the good and the bad do not come together? For so much good that there is, must not there also be bad, poor, miscontent, malcontent, to balance it out?

Love is balance. Love is peace. Love is trust and it is distrust and it is jealousy and it is protection and it is determination and it is absolution of the wrongs and penance for the sights. Love is trust; love is jealously. Love is to see your lover in the arms of another and want to end your own life at the thought of missing out on that touch. Love is determination. Perspiration. Inspiration and to believe that there will be better to come, because of love, despite love, in response to love, as a result of love. As a result of fear. As a result of impropriety and reconciliation, as a result of recognition and reparations.

Love is there. It is here. It fills and drains. It empties itself of all thought. It consumes, it subsumes, it burdens and relieves from all burden. Love is these things and more. And nothing at all. Love shall keep us alive. And it shall kill us – take us – eliminate us – remove us – it makes us. Love is degenerative, destructive. Supportive and stringent and supplicant. Love is the way we relate to the non-animals, the un-beasts of this world. The lower forms – the ox and ass and centipede and lichen – they react to the world. Stimulus – response. Action – reaction. They are not loving creatures. They cannot determine that separation between must and can. I can do this for you. I must do that for some other reason. Only one is love. The other may be devotion. It may be duty. It may be appreciation. But it is not love. Love is a choice – an all-encompassing, an enforcing, an engaging, an enraging choice. Love is a choice, and one which we will do well not to take lightly. For those who disregard love’s strength find themselves burdened – struck down – incapacitated under the weight. The weight of a hundred elephants standing end to end, pressing down on your chest. Suffocating, sterilizing, purifying. Beware – beware of love – give it not lightly. Receive it not lightly. Do both at your own peril.