I promise you not a moment will be lost
as long as I have heart & voice to speak
& we will walk together again with
a thousand others & a thousand more
& on and on
until
there is no one
among us who
does not know
the truth:
There is no future
without Love.
“All you need is love, All you need is love…” When you see these words, you probably automatically start hearing the Beatles song in your head. They first released this song in 1967 and it has lived on through the generations since.
It’s the week of St. Valentine’s Day and it seems that in every store or marketplace I enter, “love is in the air.” Well, at least the products of love are everywhere! It’s romantic and sweet, warm and fuzzy. However, there’s a lot more to this love thing than chocolates, flowers, and red and pink lacey greeting cards!
Brian Andreas’ whimsical, charming, and often brilliant word art captures the playfulness and spontaneity of love while often also speaking profound truth. Two of my favorite prints of his are “Legacy” and “Real Hero.” Indeed, corny as it may sound, “There is no future without love.” As time goes on, I understand that sentiment on increasingly deeper levels.
The fact that we have just one word – love – to represent such a wide variety of feelings and emotions can strip away the potency of its meaning. So for the sake of clarity, I’m making a distinction between small-l love and capital-L Love. I think of small-l love as my love for high-quality ice cream or shooting nature photography, or even my love for those nearest and dearest to me. I define capital-L Love, on the other hand, as “the creative and sustaining force of the universe.”
Capital-L Love is life force. It’s the creative spark, the life-giving energy for everything, the web of connection that ties everything together. It is life itself. It’s not something that you can hold in your hand or see in a specific structure or form, yet when you experience it – when you are in the presence of it – the feeling is tangible and unmistakable.
When you are aware of capital-L Love, you are present in the moment. Your personal presence – how you are showing up in the moment – is altered. You are fully present in that moment in time and space. It’s as if Love grabs you and says, “Pay attention! There’s something important happening here.” The more present you become, the deeper you experience Love, and the more alive your presence becomes.
This is what makes Love so powerful. It calls us to be present in the moment and awakens us to our own deep presence. Filled with that powerful creative and sustaining force, magic starts to happen between us and around us.
Our challenge is to be aware of the presence of Love all the time, no matter where we are or what is happening. And then to bring it forward. Sometimes Love is buried under a lot of other stuff. It’s easy to get lost in the emotions and feelings of the “stuff.” Yet when we call Love to the front of our awareness and focus on it as a creative and sustaining force, we become powerfully present in the moment. We are able to cut through the “stuff” to see what is really there, what really matters, and what wants to happen next. When we stay in the Love – indeed, embody it and let it become our life and breath – hearts find one another, mountains can be moved, and miracles can happen.
“All you need is Love” might be a little naïve. There is a limit to what Love can do if we don’t follow through with the response or action that Love inspires. Love needs us as a partner. It needs for us to say “Yes!” to what it asks of us.
True, “There is no future without Love.” Yet Brian Andreas also wisely acknowledges in his Real Hero print, “Anyone can slay a dragon, but try waking up every morning and loving the world all over again. That’s what makes a real hero.” Saying “Yes!” to Love might be the biggest challenge of our lives. Yet in my experience, it also brings the greatest rewards.
What might be possible if you were to let go of any need to “slay dragons” and just focus on “loving the world?” That doesn’t mean that you necessarily like the world or what is happening in the moment! It just means that you choose to be present with whatever is happening and show up in the best way you possibly can as Love in human form. Just be fully there, paying attention to what is happening on as many levels of awareness as you can muster. Keep stretching your capacity to “be Love,” and see what happens.
Anyone can slay a dragon, he told me,
but try waking up every morning
& loving the world
all over again.
That’s what makes a real hero.
P.S. If you would like to explore “being Love” a little further, a good place to start might be pages 142 – 145 of my book, Intuitive Living. The book is also available in digital format.
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