All About Love: New Visions (Love Song to the Nation Book 1)

Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being.

Loneliness is painful; solitude is peaceful.

Eric Butterworth writes: “True love is a peculiar kind of insight through which we see the wholeness which the person is—at the same time totally accepting the level on which he now expresses himself—without any delusion that the potential is a present reality. True love accepts the person who now is without qualifications, but with a sincere and u

Love is an action, a participatory emotion. Whether we are engaged in a process of self-love or of loving others we must move beyond the realm of feeling to actualize love. This is why it is useful to see love as a practice.

We fall into romantic attachments doomed to replay familiar family dramas. Usually we do not know this will happen precisely because we have grown up in a culture that has told us that no matter what we experienced in our childhoods, no matter the pain, sorrow, alienation, emptiness, no matter the extent of our dehumanization, romantic love will be

Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love. There is no practitioner of love who deceives. Once the choice has been made to be honest, then the next step on love’s path is communication.

“The desire to love is not itself love. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”

In her first book, The Bluest Eye, novelist Toni Morrison identifies the idea of romantic love as one “of the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought.” Its destructiveness resides in the notion that we come to love with no will and no capacity to choose. This illusion, perpetuated by so much romantic lore, stands in the way of our le

Marianne Williamson calls attention to philosopher Paul Tillich’s insistence that the first responsibility of love is to listen: “We cannot learn to communicate deeply until we learn to listen, to each other but also to ourselves and to God. Devotional silence is a powerful tool, for the healing of a heart or the healing of a nation. . . . From the