Love is great. I don’t mean to be overly cheesy here but love is just such an awesome part of out lives. We have love for people, for places, even for activities and objects, things that we hold dear. Love grows, and fades, we find it and lose it, but love has a very special way of imprinting itself on our lives so that even when it’s gone we can recall its power and importance. In this way love has a way of reminding us who we are, who we were, and who we want to be.
I was thinking about this, about how we love, how we let ourselves fall in love or hold ourselves back from it, and all the things and people for whom I feel love, when I considered my love for mountains.
Here I am, in a place I barely know, surrounded by mountains I’ve barely gotten to explore, but I already love them. How can you love a mountain at all, let alone so quickly? Why is it so much easier, or safer, than falling in love with a person? Some mountains I love immediately upon seeing them, mostly for their beauty but also for their potential, and is that so wrong, or different from the way we love people? Isn’t that something to strive for really, to develop a love for people that is immediate, open, honest and not possessive? Just to love them for them, that they may exist.
Love at first sight is a thing right? What we each find beautiful is so dynamic and changing but also pure and honest to who we are. It’s so easy to see the love coming out of someone, and pretty easy to recognize when you’re feeling it for someone else, despite how often we hold ourselves back from it in fear of being hurt. If I can love a mountain so easily, why can’t I love, or let myself be loved by another human being with the same ease? The easy and obvious answer is because the attraction we feel towards one another is often so much more physical and possessive than the sort of open awe we feel towards the mountains. We may appreciate a mountain and wish to climb it, but we know we will never own it, or truly understand it, and that’s just not the case with the physical attraction so often associated with human love. Love between humans so often leads to misunderstanding, to jealousy, possessiveness, and pain, but it doesn’t have to.
Some love is unconditional and not physical, like that of family or home, while other love grows gradually through experience and understanding. I’m thinking of my love for music, which in many ways was always there, inside of me, but relied on training and learning to truly flourish. Sometimes we fall in love quickly and deeply, only to realize we’ve let ourselves be deceived. This can make us feel foolish or naive, but is it really that bad isn’t it just another way we learn to love? Sometimes it’s the love that comes on strong, that arrives out of nowhere that lasts the longest, other times this is the type destined to burn up quickly and leave a charred reminder of love’s potential for pain. But even when this is the case should we really brace ourselves against an offer of love in fear that it’s not destined to last, or keep ourselves from loving someone or something because they don’t fit into our ideal of perfection or have anything to offer us?
I’ll be honest, I had this realization about love late at night, and I fought myself back awake to write it down, to record it, because I felt it’s power, felt that it had somehow opened something in me, an awareness that was new and useful, one I wanted to hold on to. But now, in trying to refine and explain it, I can’t help but feel I’m falling short, to you, and even to myself. But is this even that surprising? Love is after all a felling, an emotion, ever changing, shifting, and so different for each of us. How can it be caught, captured or explained to anyone? Let alone how many different types of love there are, how impossible it is to imagine or catagorize them all.
All I can really hope is that this brief diversion into my careless love of mountains can help me better understand, and cultivate, the many types of love that fills my life. How easy it is to appreciate the beauty of the curve of a ridge line, a neckline, or anything inbetween. And what is love really but an appreciation, of beauty and connection?
I think that’s the essence for me – Love is Beauty – or at least an appreciation of it. Love is a good thing, something to cultivate in our lives with care and understanding. But love is so often tempered by mind, by misunderstanding, expectations, and ideals. The more we can stick to the basics, the better. When we feel love, which is hopefully often, we must do our best to remember that the object of our love, and even really the love itself, are not ours. That is, to not grasp at that which we love, or even the act or feeling of love itself, for this love is simply an entity that offers to enrich our lives through its existence, not our possession or control of it.
Love is often defined as a strong affection or attachment to something, or a sense of deep appreciation, to cherish or thrive. I can’t help and feel that the latter part of this definition is so much more apt to describe our love for mountains and experience in them, and how we might apply and cultivate that type of love in all parts of our lives. Love deeply and fully, so that our love might enrich the very object and experience of the thing we love.