Love

I haven't blogged in a while. Mostly that's because I reread everything I'd written in the past year and basically hated most if not all of it. And, because I've been busy. And because I make excuses. :)

However, I need to write today, so poor prose be damned- it's gotta go somewhere, might as well take flight into the deep void of the internet.

I went to church yesterday for the first time in five years- not a Mormon church, but a Unitarian church. I figure, any church that allows you to be an atheist and has accepted homosexuals for ages probably can't be half bad. The pastor (or minister or whatever they call him) read a passage from Ursula Goodenough who is an atheist (religious naturalist) who talked about how she wishes, during times of trouble, that she could believe in a god to call on; yet because she cannot, she must rely on human love in all its fragility and imperfection, to help heal.

I think about love a lot. What it means to love someone, what constitutes "love" verses affection, whether there really is a thin line between love and hate, how to love someone and not be in love with them, how love manifests itself through actions, whether love can "die." So many questions about this emotion/feeling, so few direct answers. No one seems to have concordant answers to the questions.

Is it love if you don't say it?
Is it love if you betray?
Is it love if you can't forgive?
Is it love if sometimes you feel it more than others?
Is it love if it ends?
Is it love if you choose yourself over someone else?

I don't have answers either. However, having suffered my fair share of life's slings and arrows, I do believe, at the end of the day, that love is an ever-fixed mark that looks on tempests and is not shaken. I believe love comes with a price, like everything. It can be a heavy price, but at the end of the day, even while paying that price, I will say that I am not sorry to pay it. And so, come what may, I am thankful to have had the opportunity to have loved.

Then jet the blue tent topple, stars rain down,
and god or void appall us till we drown
   in our own tears: today we start
to pay the piper with each breath, yet love
knows not of death nor calculus above
   the simple sum of heart plus heart.

- Sylvia Plath