jakebe | "Words fail me."

Recently I've been giving a lot of thought to the word 'love,' and what it means. I'm not sure about anyone else, but my perception of love over the years has come to be a bull-shit, sanitized-Hallmark sentiment that New Agers throw around like so many chakra healings. It doesn't mean anything. It's so easy to use that word and not mean it, so easy to lie about it. When I hear the word directed at me, my first, knee-jerk response is something like a vague sort of...disbelief coupled with a kind of dismissive attitude. He doesn't love me, he doesn't *really* know me. While bits of this may be true, it strikes me as unfair to summarily categorize each expression of affection that same way.

You can't think about love without thinking about hate, supposedly it's diametric opposite. (Actually, I really do believe that's apathy, but that's neither here nor there.) Hate is a much easier sentiment to imagine and believe; it still has it's teeth. When someone says they hate something, you can buy into it. Hatred for many things abound; the Wiggles, George Bush, liberals, faggots, cheese, oatmeal, Kevin Costner...but what makes expressions of hate so markedly different from expressions of love are the force with which they're expelled. A person who hates something is more likely than not going to go on a 15-minute diatribe about all the reasons they hate it, whereas someone who professes to love something won't offer anything more often than not.

Hate is forceful, love is yielding. Hate is aggressive, love just is. Hate is loud, love is quiet. Hate is everywhere you look, love is more or less invisible. Are these bad qualities? No. It just makes love difficult to spot unless you really look. Hate is almost instantly recognizable in the things people do; love is something that you *must* contemplate.

I keep thinking about all the times someone has said they loved me, and all the times I've said I love someone else. Looking back on that, it occured to me that I'm not sure I ever really meant that. It wasn't an intentional lie; I don't think I really understood what love was at that point. I really didn't care about myself until relatively recently, so the whole concept of pouring actual love into someone else was alien to me. What I felt towards these people were more need of things; I didn't love them as such, but I loved what they did for me...or didn't do, or could do. Thinking, there were a few people who actually meant love when they said it, and I didn't even recognize it at the time. I think that's the only thing I really, really regret in my life.

What makes love seem so...weak? I think it's because the most common manifestations are negative. People stay in abusive relationships because they love this person; yes, there are probably many other factors involved in it, but in every one I've ever seen love is the core. People put up with the most horrible shit, because they've got to. Love, unlike hate, doesn't seem to be a choice. It just happens, and you'd better hope the person who's the recipient of it is good for you.

Each time you fall in love, it feels like the first time. The intensity of it just...bores into you, to the point it's fundamental. I haven't been scared of losing someone for a very long time, and I'm remembering what it felt like. The last people I really, *really* loved were my mother and sister. When my sister ran away for several months one time, I had this...incredibly strange reaction that I didn't understand. I couldn't do anything, I didn't want to do anything. I felt...empty. I would spend a lot of time just staring. I didn't know what that was at the time, but it was, quite simply, being hurt so badly that you grow numb. It's never a pleasant thing to have something fundamental ripped out of you. The same thing happened with my mother when all that shit went down, and my father too. I didn't know it at the time, but that's what it is. I won't say 'scarred', because that's a therapeutic (and mostly untrue) word, but those experiences fundamentally changed me.

These days, I feel like I have a much better handle on recognizing (and giving) love. I only say "I love you," when I mean it, and I know I mean it only when it's the mose inadequate thing I can say. Love is such a thin, watery word to describe what I feel for people, but there's nothing else that even comes close without slipping into the greeting-card grab-bag of overused metaphors. There's no way I can explain how...basic my feelings get. It's hard to make that understood, through words *or* actions. Nothing I do can ever seem appreciative *enough*. That's how I know I mean it.

When you get right down to it, all words, all ideas expressed by them, are just fingers pointing to a reflection of the moon. It's up to us to see where they point and look up. Most times this is easy. When I say 'blue,' my finger points, and most people immediately follow it and look up accordingly. Get more abstract (define 'color') and the directions become exponentially more vague. Something like 'love' or 'joy' is impossible to point to, especially to some people who just can't recognize them. It's at times like these when the impotence of language really hits me. Words are important, true, and they're my weapon of choice for all intents and purposes, but only the very gifted can make an abstract concept understood in the way that it needs to be so that people are affected by it.

Speaking of which, it strikes me that there seems to be two levels of understanding with things. (Yes, look at the pretty tangent.) People 'get' things all right, but they don't truly *get* them. True understanding, it seems to me, is followed by an inevitable shift in word and deed that comes from a shift in perspective. No more is this dichotomy in levels of understanding apparent than with the Tao Teh Ching, and Eastern philosophy in general. There are so many people who understand the teachings of the Buddha, or Lao-tzu, but there's a paradoxical expression of ego that comes out of it that you're sure they're not *really* getting it, you just don't know *how* they're not. Just something that's been on my mind after reading a few LiveJournalsI hate to criticize, but it really chaps me when people claim to be teachers but don't live up to standard. We all have faults, sure, but if I want "Do as I say, not as I do" teaching, I'd still be a Jehovah's Witness.