on giving love

Love is a funny thing- the more you give the more you receive. It's really quite counterintuitive. Humans are fearful beings, always afraid of being taken advantage of, or laughed at, or hurt. Love beckons us into the only place where we can truly live, not just existing, breathing in and out, but awakened to the infinite beauty all around us and in us. Love climbs over the walls that we build to protect it.

We cannot love at the cost of another. If we love our family, we must also love the families across the oceans, across our street, across the political or religious divide. Because, by acknowledging how much our own are loved so dearly, we must also acknowledge how dearly they are loved by their own as well. Love asks us to open the door and be vulnerable. Sometimes she asks we step outside, sometimes she asks we invite her in. 

The beauty of love is that once you meet her, in the eyes of a stranger who you realize you have always known, in the mother desperately trying to save her child, in the soldier prepared to die for her country, once you meet Love, neither of you is left unchanged.