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Live and Let Love

This month's Porcelain Ashes column is a sole contribution by Krystal, inspired by a conversation both columnist recently had. Krystal: Let's talk about love. But let me start out by saying that I've become very jaded over the years.

This month's Porcelain Ashes column is a sole contribution by Krystal, inspired by a conversation both columnist recently had.

Krystal:

Let's talk about love. But let me start out by saying that I've become very jaded over the years. Honestly, sometimes I've given up on some aspects of love that I've been blessed enough to fathom. But yeah, let's talk a little about love because being jaded is still somehow inferior to the love I periodically "give up on," especially for functionality. It's always been interesting to me how love is so many different things, yet its universal existence is the core of everyone's principles, whether they are fighting love or using it to live larger--you simply can't escape being made of love.

Yako, as I was saying to you the other day, I perceive that the difference between "love" and what causes us to "live" is found in the differing letters of each of the words' makeup-- The "I" versus the "O". The "I" is a line, having two points that make it up, which is the platform of understanding value. This value is the basis of time—our primal means of surviving and understanding each other socially.

We have on the other hand "O," something that is understood as having no structural beginning or end point in the construct of value. It is a shape that represents how time and space is understood a different way. Rather than being made of two points, a beginning and end, it is the secret weapon to our very existence.

That, to me, is how love is, something that isn't bound by time. When you think about it, love is the only thing that can be at least two different things and still hold truth. It can be letting go as well as holding on. It can be listening with an open heart as well as blocking things out for the purpose of sustaining personal truths. It is what ties us to the past, and preserves us for the future. It has many attributes, and those are what we use to identify our human values.

To demonstrate that love is larger than life and time, let see what happens when a loved one passes. They have no choice but to leave behind the love that inhabited them. This is mostly understood by grieving, an act taking place within those who remain alive on this earth after someone's spirit has left their fleshly body. When you lose someone, it is love that keeps the conversation of them alive in your emotions and consciousness. Love does not merely live, because it is not bound by life or death.

Another sentimental example is hearing a song that reminds you of an aspect of a relationship that is no more. No matter what your feelings are following your initial reaction, you naturally feel the very things that attracted you to that moment or mass of memory. This emotion is sometimes avoided at great lengths by individuals, just to protect one's heart from being vulnerable to the pain of loss.

Another attribute of love is the initial desire to live freely, yet placing someone and something other than yourself as a higher priority than your needs, desires, and wants for the other's well-being/interest. It is taking action and responsibility for something outside of yourself, and owning that from a place of compassion as opposed to self-gain. Commitment is the driving force of love, because it is consistency lived out as its own law. Acts of appreciation, receiving, giving, these are all intangible gifts that allow us as beings to flourish together and separately.

My point to all this is that love cannot be taken, given or defined by others, and does not require validation by human beings, to say the least. No one can rightfully tell another how to love, who to love, or when to love, because to be alive is to be love itself. Love itself is the glue that holds our society together and allows us to survive while being separated and divided.

Some believe that hate must exist in order for love to, but I dare to say that hate is a manmade necessity. Having hate weakens the heart, while love strengthens it. This proves its inferiority. Hatred cannot live in the realm of absolute, and as illustrated before, love can. It is a weakened or hardened. Our minds use hate as a concept of understanding love. That's why people argue that love wins, because hatred is inferior to it being that it needs love to exist in order to be defined at all.

Love is the ultimate glitch in time in that it allows you to feel emotion about things that you haven't experienced directly, and is not that is based off of occurrence. It is displayed through empathy and compassion. It is a bottomless well that we must drink from in order to survive. It is life's fuel.

Hatred can also be used as a tool to feel things that haven't touched us directly, but even that is really just the struggle against love, and hatred always stems from love scorned. It is merely a reaction to love, not an equal part. Hatred cannot create, it only destroys. That destruction will always be inferior, because destruction can destroy itself, and love cannot, nor can it be destroyed, because it is not in existence from the power of destruction.

One other thing to point out about hatred is that it is even less powerful than us. When compared to love, it cannot choose you, while love can. To complete the dynamic, you cannot choose love, but you can choose hate. This proves its lack of power in our lives. It's as if it's an appealing application that you can download to your phone, but turns out to be a virus. This leaves us responsible for what hatred breeds should we entertain it in our lives.

Let's be honest about this...we do entertain it in our lives at some point, but we are not slaves to it since the power of love is superior to it. While all of this sounds like a blueprint for a Celine Dion song, let me just assure you that the conversation about love is a much needed one these days, and you can never have too much of it.

~Krystal




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