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What Is Love?

Love is holding hands through the rain even when not speaking. Feeling each other’s breath from far away. Knowing that no matter what, you would die for this person. Sacrifice, losing all inhibitions, walking away from old life into new. Love is grasping at straws to make sense of the world, unity in even the smallest rhythms, feeling one shrink at the sound of the other’s pain, knowing that person inside and out. Love is big, bigger than life, cannot be contained in a single thought. Love is what happens when the predictable and expected is swept away. Love is the answer to so many things. Love is the joy in a newborn’s smile, the softness of a mother’s womb, feeling yourself up through just being together, summer time in your soul and autumn in your heart. Love is a gentle stirring, yet explosive as a volcano. Love can’t be questioned, or judged, or doubted. Love is a certainty between a mother and child, a father coaching his son’s team, a sibling smiling down. Love is the battle within your own mind. The truth, the experience, that knows no doubt. Love is the center, the touchstone, the light.

It is being quiet when chaos dances around. Love is the gift that will not die, the journey of a thousand hearts. Love is the one thing so many want, more do not have, some others shrug off. Love is the chance your soul takes again when the tides of self-doubt threaten your sanity. Love is the making of a million babies, the smallness of an infant’s hand.

Love is where we all strive to be, some of us more gracefully than others.

Love is the hand-holding, the nights of such sparks, the one thing that centers one to another.


-Terri Rimmer
8-2-02

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