Definition Essay - The Meaning of Love

The Meaning of Love

One can love a sister, a brother, a mother, a father, grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins and friends, strangers, pets, the sunlight on a warm evening, reflecting through a prism, held by fishing line stuck to a little suction cup to a dusty window. You can love food from cake to roast beef, even those tiny individual candy bars that are never enough but just give you a taste of chocolate before you pop in the second one. One is able to love the feeling of carpet between toes or the tension in a hammocks string when you lay in that 'u' position swinging delightfully with each motion of your body. We can declare love for sounds coming from a stereo, love for that particular sound wave in coordination with other sound waves that make it to the inner ear as that thing we call music. Some of us love to feel a little pain, love feeling that edge of life that lets us know we're alive, nerves tingling with the sensation that something is not quite right, mind ablaze with the knowledge that the power to commit more pain or to stop it is in grasp. One might love a particular spot in the world, a city, a hill, a nook, a field of sunflowers swaying in the breeze. From flying an airplane at sound-breaking speeds or laying near comatose, the only movement the flipping of pages and the flitting of eyes as words are dragged into a brain to organize, recognize, and realize their meaning in correlation to each other. Love is all around us, continually exuding from ourself and others. When what someone does not love is near, or when it's something they hate, we are quick to learn it. The disgust in the face as a lump of food falls out of the mouth that tried something new or something forgotten. The shying away from a cer...

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... anyone . . . then love must simply be everything else. For one, a scritch of fingernails across green blackboard is a loathsome, marrow scraping experience. For another, the drunken footsteps upon a staircase pounding higher and higher, closer and closer to the bedroom door. Maybe being touched on the nose or those little prickly seeds that hold on like velcro to anything they touch. At the same time another could love those little spiky balls, or enjoy owning drunken feet, the world a blur with head so heavy. Love is so ready to include that anyone is hard-pressed to find something the world excludes and places in a bin called "hate."

So I ask you to love, to experience this feeling throughout every nerve of your body, every electric-impulse of a brain cell, every beat of your heart and blink of the eye.

Because that's what love is to me. Simply everything.