“The Spindle of Necessity” notwithstanding, I am not a philosopher. I have no great truths about the universe. I have no system to explain the world. The world just is; I don’t question its existence.
Yet. Something strange is in the air. In the past three weeks, multiple friends have sought my input on the same subject.
Love.
I am no great expert on the subject. I admit that upfront. Greater philosophers than myself have written of love. Great poets have written more on the subject than I could ever hope to scratch. I have no idea what I could offer to the discussion of love and what it is and what it means.
Because, truthfully, the only experience of love I have is mine. Love is subjective and personal. It’s an idea. And one cannot extrapolate from one’s personal experiences to universal truths.
Unless you’re Plato and Aristotle, who were probably the smartest stupid people history has ever produced. Sorry, I had to get a shot in at those two. Read “Spindle,” you’ll understand.
But friends asked, and I wouldn’t have been me had I ducked the question. Their stories were all different, their reasons for wanting to know all different. I won’t tell their stories; these aren’t my stories to tell. I will, however, share my view on the subject. It’s almost poetical, in its own way.
Love is a garden.
We give the people we love seeds. We plant them and we nurture them, and the plants, we hope, will grow and blossom and flower. Some plants are flowers, some are mighty trees. Each is different, because they are planted with different seeds.
Some of us nurture different plants, and many are in blossom at any time. Some of nurture a single tree and it grows large and mighty and impressive. Each garden is as individualistic as each of us are.
We are the gardeners of our own love.
Sometimes the plants wither. Sometimes the plants die.
Sometimes there’s not enough sunshine or rainfall or rainbows.
Sometimes the plants never take root — the ground may be too hard and too rocky, the right kind of fertilizer may not be available, the right amount of nurturing never happens.
And sometimes, there are horrific conflagrations that burn down whole swathes of the garden, leaving part of the garden fallow. Hopefully, these times never happen, and hopefully when they do they are rare.
Yet, there is always love there, in our gardens, even if sometimes
we need to look for it, or we need to clear away the undergrowth and the brambles, or if we feel as though our store of love has run out of seeds from which to grow something new.
Love isn’t finite. It’s not a cookie or a pie that we break apart and give away until we’re out of love to share.
Love is infinite. It’s something that is always there, and it grows and it flowers and in the sunlight of life it looks marvelous.
Thus endeth the philosophy lesson. 🙂
Of course, I have to ask — Do I look like Mike Myers as The Love Guru? Did anyone even go to see that movie? You couldn’t pay me to see that movie.