Today’s Quotation:
Love is something you and I must have. We must have it because our spirit feeds upon it. We must have it because without it we become weak and faint. Without love our self-esteem weakens. Without it our courage fails. Without love we can no longer look confidently at the world. We turn inward and begin to feed upon our own personalities, and little by little we destroy ourselves. With it we are creative. With it we march tirelessly. With it, and with it alone, we are able to sacrifice for others.
Chief Dan George
Today’s Meditation:
The power of love can be seen very clearly in this passage that tells us how we react when we have no love in our lives, or when we have too little love or no unconditional love. Love is all around us, everywhere, but sometimes it seems that precious little of it is pointed in our direction, that we don’t have enough of it in our lives.
When we feel loved, we tend to be much stronger. The irony is that we all are loved, but most of us sometimes feel unloved, bringing on the negative feelings and reactions ourselves. Sometimes we don’t recognize love because it’s not being shared in the ways that we expect, or we can even reject love because it’s not coming from the people we want it to come from.
By sharing our own love, imagine the kind of power we can share with others–imagine how we can empower others to strengthen so many important aspects of their lives. We can help people to express parts of themselves that they otherwise might keep hidden, and it costs us nothing to give them that help. And we’re not talking romantic love here–we’re talking about the kind of love that we feel for others simply because they are, and because of the compassion that we feel for them and their state.
We can love extensively, and that doesn’t mean that we have to walk around saying “I love you” to everyone. When we do love, we don’t diminish ourselves at all–we’re not losing something by giving it away. Quite to the contrary, we’re strengthening ourselves by strengthening the entire world by helping to make other individuals stronger and more loving people themselves.
Questions to ponder:
1. How do you feel when you feel unloved?
2. What changes in your life when you feel loved?
3. In what ways might you share your love without giving “wrong signals” to other people who might misunderstand it?
For further thought:
Where there is great love there are always miracles.
Willa Cather
Credit: Living Life Fully