We *say* love all the time, and then sometimes we get REALLY weird about it. People can say they love their family, their partner, their pets, but the moment you say you love a friend (in that way that makes it clear that we are talking *love* love, not like *pizza* love), people start to slide sideways. (Double sliding if said friend is of the opposite sex and you are married or otherwise attached).
There doesn't seem to be room in the world for this idea of deep platonic love. People tend to think the only kind of love that *counts* is romantic love, and beyond that just being HORRIBLY reductive and erasing the aromantic humans of the world, it always sat SO awkward to me. Why can't I love my friends? Why can't I look them in the eye and tell them I love them and hug them so tight I think we both might implode? Why are we SO afraid to love?
In my experience, so much of it comes down to vulnerability. The more we love, deeply and unabashedly, the more we gotta sit with our own fractured shattery depths, the more we gotta let people in even when we aren't our best perfect-est selves. It's *terrifying* to think of what could happen. What if we trust, and then they drop us, and where does that leave us if we are just so....open all the time? It leaves us prone to having our tenderest selves poked and prodded and possibly bruised.
But....let's sit with that a moment.
Recently, I sat with a group of people I love (my Ruhi book 1 group) and we talked about some of the hardest bits of ourselves. It wasn't intentional - I had some past life context I thought was appropriate to share, and it just kinda exploded from there. There were tears and fear and a lot of messy bits, but then...then this happened.
I dunno if you can see all the love in this picture, but I sure as heck can. (For reference, I'm in the middle.) No one in this picture *had* to be here, had to sit with each other in the darkest dark, but we did, because we all took a chance on opening our hearts and just knew that we could, because of our shared context, love on each other. Maybe we didn't fix the world, but all of us breathe a little easier, because we know that we can be our most authentic, vulnerable selves, without fear.
As someone *much* wiser than me said,“ . . . If a small number of people gather lovingly together, with absolute purity and sanctity, with their hearts free of the world, experiencing the emotions of the Kingdom and the powerful magnetic forces of the Divine, and being at one in their happy fellowship, that gathering will exert its influence over all the earth.” (Selections from the Writings of ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, p. 81)
Love is scary. Love is hard and terrifying and it is *hard work*. But it's not impossible, and it's *important*. We talk about how we have to love ourselves, this whole movement of self care and self love, and how we have to love our partners and our children, but...maybe, maybe there's more we gotta do. Maybe we gotta learn to love on each other, so we can share the things of our hearts and we can all move a little safer.
