I often wonder.
How big can our love be?
Does it stop with ourselves? Is our love only for our individual human self, our Kathy, our John, our Diana, our Lee Ann, our own precious being wearing this human flesh?
Does our love shine fuller, brighter? Does it encompass our friends, those who think like we do? Does it beat swifter for those who seem like us, who resonate, who agree? Does it wrap its loving blanket around our pals, our best friends, our dear ones, our companions? Is this sweet love how we recognize the world?
Does our love include our dear families? Does it weave a song around our brothers and sisters who perhaps think differently but are connected by blood and DNA and history? Does it include our mothers and fathers and grandparents and children and grandchildren? Does our love reverberate with those who share our common threads of family, no matter what beliefs and opinions?
Or does our love move outward in circles upon circles? Does our love circle outward to include those we don’t know? Does it reach into our community? Can we expand our love to include the butcher, the baker, the owner of the local restaurant? Does it include the father screaming at the basketball game, the woman with plucked eyebrows and opinions?
Does our love keep zooming outward to include those who differ from us? Can our love recognize the commonality of those with different skin colors? Those who act differently than we might act? Those who fail according to our standards? Those who lie homeless, who wander addicted, who respond differently than we imagine we might respond? Those who speak differently, who think differently, who live differently. Can we see past the differences into what connects us?
Does it include the Democrat, the Republican, the Libertarian? Does it include the one who publicly flaunts our beliefs? Does it include the one who can’t or won’t love?
How wide can our love go? Can it surpass the boundaries of our communities? Can it fly over imaginary boundaries of countries? Can it see beyond?
Can it truly see beyond and beyond and beyond?
Or does it stop with what it understands?
Does it stop with what it imagines it knows?
I look inside myself and notice where love seems to stop…and then try to see what limits I’m assigning. We’re so often assigning limits in our love. They’re often unconscious limits, unconscious walls, unconscious barriers.
Are we willing to keep loving outward in larger concentric circles? Or will we stop with borders, boundaries, skin color, misunderstandings?
I don’t understand a love that wants to limit itself to a single person, to a family, to a community, to friends, to a country, to an earth. Yes, they are all magnificent shining loves! But true love always wants to keep moving outward and outward. It keeps wanting to see the next seemingly unloved being as love itself.
I often wonder.
Are there places where love simply shouldn’t go? Where it can’t go?
(And aren’t those places exactly where love might make the most difference? Where love might shine in the complete darkness and illuminate that which seems most lacking?)
How big can our love be?
This is what I wonder when I see people limiting love. When I see myself limiting love. I wonder…
How big can our love be?
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Previously Published on Lake Superior Spirit
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