Dedication. Dedication to a cause – to a person – to an ideal. To a partnership. It is a way to show love; to be dedicated is. Some derive not love from dedication, but the other way round. Love is the instigator of other feelings. It is not the end product, but the beginning. It is the riverbed, the fountainhead. It is the source, the fountain from which flow dedication, and affection, and affirmation. Trust. Hope. Desire. Oh, certainly, desire comes with lust without love. But love, when it begins there, develops them into a pure, unadulterated method. The other is a pale, limp, flimsy imitation. The other is surface – shallow. It does not hold, does not last. Does not sustain. It is mutable – it is transient. It goes and comes as the tides, rising and falling without control.
The other – the one fed by love – those are more permanent. More tangible. They are a glacier-fed lake high in the mountain, sparkling under a cloudless sky. They are the pure, permanent stillness of the waters waiting to be touched. They are the quiet trees ringing the edge, waiting for action. Silent – permanent. Solid. They are immovable, immutable. Their – they are not transient. They do not disappear with the phases of the moon. They do not dry up and come on and dry up in a cycle such that there is no more reasonability within. They are real. They are permanent. They last.
And because they last they Matter. They have Substance. They have Stuff. They have Essence. They are true and real and permanent and beautiful and visible and tangible and they are the best thing to happen to that world in a long time, perhaps ever; they are what makes the lake worth being. They are the outcome of a billion years of progress; they are the pinnacle of evolution. And yet too they are simply a way station, a midpoint. They are a piece in the puzzle that, another billion years farther on, will look completely different yet, will, of course, be intimately traceable back through that history to the primal source: Love.
Stephan Writes 