Love is

People say love is a feeling. They often speak about love in the language of action. Though I understand why, I don't think love itself is either. I believe love manifested within us gives rise to feelings and actions, and they are evidence of love, not love itself.

I'm not saying actions don't matter. They absolutely do. They're one of the few ways we ever get to witness and physically experience love. I just don't believe they're the thing itself.

We've all seen people perform loving actions without actually loving someone. Grand gestures. Beautiful words. Public declarations. Promises. Sometimes we find out later that none of it was genuine. That's part of why I stopped believing those things could define love. If they can exist without love, then they can't be love itself.

The words aren't love.

The touch isn't love.

The sacrifice isn't love.

The silence isn't love.

They're all ways we recognize it.

Love just is.

To me, love is a spirit. Love is unseen. It simply exists whether we perceive it or not.

It exists apart from us. Then, somehow, it moves through us. It doesn't ask us to become someone else before it arrives. It meets us exactly as we are: our temperament, our fears, our softness, our wounds, our communication style, our culture, our emotional capacity, and our way of showing care.

What becomes visible depends on the person. Love remains what it has always been. We simply experience it, reveal it, and carry it differently.

That doesn't mean it never changes us. I think it often does. It can soften the stoic, quiet the loud, or make someone brave in ways they never expected. But I don't think love itself changes because it entered us. I think we change because we encountered love.

An expressive person doesn’t necessarily have more love than a quiet person simply because they speak it more. Nor does a stoic person necessarily have less love because they don't perform it outwardly. The same love can exist in both, while looking completely different from one person to the next.

Maybe that's why people can look at the same love and come away describing completely different things. If love moves through each of us differently, then it makes sense that it won't always look the same. 

Love isn't something we manufacture or force into existence. I think, in many ways, it's inevitable. It simply is. 

That's when I thought about the ocean.

I think we've spent so much time looking at the waves that we've mistaken them for the ocean itself. The waves are what the ocean does. They aren't all that the ocean is.

The waves aren't the ocean. The crashing isn't the ocean. The stillness isn't the ocean. The warmth isn't the ocean. The undertow isn't the ocean. They're all evidence that the ocean is there, but none of them are the ocean itself.

You could stand beside the ocean on a perfectly still morning and someone might look at it and say, "Nothing is happening." But the ocean is still there. Its depth is still there. Its currents are still there. Its power is still there.

Then a storm comes, and suddenly everyone notices its power and its force. The storm didn't create the ocean, it simply revealed something that was already there.

I wonder if love is like that.

Love just is.