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Unconditional love is a misnomer. Love alone in its meaning is unconditional. Anything else that we experience from one human being to another or from any other being to other that has conditions on it is not love, this is why we so often as human beings become confused. We label desire as love, attachment as love, passion as love, sex as love. If these definitions were true then could we use love to describe how we feel about our parents, our children, our pets, our friendships, our recreational activities? One who has sex with ones children, or ones pets, or ones parents is not performing an act of love. Substitute desire, or passion or attachment for sex in the previous sentence and you start to understand.

We've all heard the expression "I'm falling in love" But love is not something one can fall in and out of. It is lasting and constant by its very definition. When a person expresses this opinion what he or she often means is "I desire you", or "I'm sexually attracted to you", or "I feel passion when I'm with you", all of which can exist without loving a person. And love in itself can exist separate from passion or desire or sex. If someone says to you "I do not love you anymore" then he or she never loved you. What he or she may have felt for you is one of the aforementioned nouns.

"If you love me you would...", is not a statement about love. Love does not have conditions. Love does not require you to be submissive. Love does not require you suffer. Love itself is transforming. And it comes from within not from without. One cannot perform true acts of kindness, or of caring, or generosity without the presence of love. Not the kind that is deeply felt by the giver and the receiver that is lasting and memorable. It is simply not possible. And it is the only than that you can give away that replenishes itself one hundred times over.

Love is a state of being. It is what it is. The things that we do are only expressions of love not love itself. The way air expresses itself as wind, or water expresses itself in the form of snow. Without air there is no wind, without water there is no snow, without love there is no kindness.

Once we come to accept this even if we can't fully understand it that's when the power of love is at its most definitive and we enter a state of grace and peace like no other.

The Sun Never Says

Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
"You owe Me."
Look what happens with
A love like that,
It lights the Whole Sky.
- Hafiz

Be well.

Learn more about this author, KD Zuppinger.
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