Love Is Strong As Death

The search for Love has turned lives upside down.  I’ve seen love make fools of the most “together” people.  I’ve seen rejection from love turn people into drug-addicts and alcoholics, into people who consume an excess of food to cope with their depression and into those who deprive themselves of nourishment completely.  I’ve seen love-spurned people bury themselves in their work and cease from work all together.  I know suicides have been committed, Romeo and Juliet-style, for love lost and never found.  I’ve seen people searching themselves to death and never finding fulfillment in the one they’re looking for.  This is beyond tragedy.  It’s just flat wrong. 

Let me be the first to admit that I’ve been there.  Hello, my name is Allie, and I’m a recovering search-aholic. 

What the heck are we looking for anyway?  Comfort?  Joy?  Peace?  Purpose?  Fulfillment?  Hope?  A better future than our present?  Physical gratification?  Someone who understands us?  Someone who knows all of our faults, our strengths and weaknesses and is still consumed by their love for us? Someone who, of their own free will, chooses to love us in LIGHT of - not in spite of - who we truly are?

Most people don’t chase after magical, ocean-dwelling purple sea urchins who belch gold. 

I mean if people didn’t think that true love existed, they probably wouldn’t spend so much of their time, effort and idle thought chasing after it.  Even the most rational of thinkers have put on their scuba equipment in search of the one they could not find.  So are we crazy to think that authentic, non-selfish love exists?  And naïve enough to believe that we “just haven’t found it yet”?  

Perhaps.  Or maybe we really are just “looking for love in all the wrong places.”  If Love had an address, where would it reside?  (I like to think it would live at 777 American Way, but alas, I have yet to find it).  Maybe the answer is as simple and as common as the breath we breathe: Love lives with us. 

So many of us have been on the inside looking out, peering out the window and hoping that Love will someday find us.  It already has.  It's time to open our eyes right where we are and see that Love abides with us now - in all things great and small.  Your treasure is where your heart is, not in some far-off, distant land you’ve never traveled.  The truth is, the road less traveled by is the one that leads to your own doorstep.  If what you sought were in some distant, uncharted territory, then as soon as you lived there awhile it would no longer be distant and uncharted.  It would be familiar and demystified.  And Love certainly couldn’t live among what's common to you, could it?  That would be far too boring or far too threatening.  

Or endlessly exciting.

It would require us to face ourselves in the mirror, to look at the good and the bad and to love who we are anyway.  Authentic Love would require that we love ourselves enough to be unselfish, non-judgmental, devoted, unfading and endlessly faithful to someone else.  Authentic Love would strip all the layers away and leave our hearts exposed and vulnerable to breathe freely and experience a life fully lived. 

None of us are just down on our luck and “not good enough” or “too good” to find true Love - in romance, in friendships or family relationships.  But we just might be afraid that discovering true Love right where we live is too much of a risk.  After all, it might turn our lives upside down and change us forever. 

So is authentic Love really worth the adjustment?  I think so, since so many people seem willing to live and die in search of it.  As for me, I think I’ll put my scuba equipment to rest and quit searching for something I already have.  But if you do happen to find any magical purple sea urchins, do put me at the top of your Christmas list.