To feel love, one must know love. One must have experienced it in some way in oder to appreciate it. The idea that one must learn to love oneself in order to love another stems from this basic idea, although it is turned on its head.
But we all experience love in some way or another. As children we feel it from our parents or caretakers, and even if they do not love us, we feel it for them. It is a attachment we carry with us forever, even when we do not recognize it. It is a feeling of belonging that we bear with us no matter how old we get. We remember it as home. We feel we belong there when we are with them.
But later in life, when we detach from them, from our mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, we are forced to fill a hole left in our hearts. We desire to form a new home, a new set of links all of which are based in that most primal of all our emotions, love.
But is this really love?
Yes, absolutely! Love is too often confused with that romance novel soap opera kind of love, but love is, and always has been, so much more than that. It is the power that draws us, forces us, to seek out connections with others, with our nation, with our culture and language, and with the Gods.
We are forced to seek out our place in the great web of life, that little knot in the web that connects us to all other things, big and small, because love is not really about lust, but about connection.
So when we seek out family, we are doing so out of love. When we seek out our friend, it is love that causes that impulse. When we are drawn to a lover, it is love. And when we are drawn to the divine, we do so because we feel the love that is part and parcel of the divine sphere. We feel Aphrodite’s presence, whatever we may call her, and we respond to it.
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