Love....a journey of the heart

Love...the mention of the word gives feelings of butterflies, makes your heart pound, your heart soar. As a high school teacher (in the Spring), love is is the air. Teenage love is special. It's the first time that someone near you really makes your heart beat, that you feel a bit out of control. It's an exhilarating and frightening feeling, the edge of control. I watch my students, googly eyed, looking at the target of their affection, whispering "I love you." I remember those feelings, just wanting to hold hands, a touch that implies more. Young love is glorious and lays the foundation for love of the future.

Love in your twenties is like a series of tests, figuring out who you want to be with, what traits you desire. Each date, each look, each touch laying a foundation for your future. What do you want? What is your desire? What do you need from another. So many questions, so many answers.

What is love? An emotion? A feeling that you convey to others? Are there levels of love? Ones that you feel for family, another for friends, yet another for the one that makes your heart beat faster? How does one move from one level to the next? When you have a friend and you feel affection, love, for them, what determines that you move from a friend to, say, a lover. Is there a deeper level of trust? Affection?

What about being "in love?" Is that different from love itself? Is being "in love" the active form of love? Is "in love" an even deeper emotional connection involving mind, body and soul. How is it that some can fall in love and then fall out of love. Is it a transitional feeling that, like a river, ebbs and flows or, like a garden, something that needs to be tended regularly?

What about falling out of love? The feeling of the skin of affection being slowly ripped from your heart. The pain of loss and the scars left behind. How does one trust again? How does one let down their guard and let the warm feelings of love wash over them again? These questions truly have no answers.

Love is a journey of the heart, mind, soul. We love others, often with a depth that cannot be described. If you are lucky enough to fall in love, deeply feeling in your heart the impact of another on your spirit, you are opening the well of your soul
. The breaking of the bond can almost be unbearable, but like so much of our spirit, these cracks can seal, a scar created that makes us even stronger.

The journey is worth it. Opening yourself to another being is the ultimate form of connection, a feeling that we, as humans, seek in order to grow. Sometimes we need to walk away to find our path, take our own personal journey, but in this journey, we will find ourselves.

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