I learnt from Kahlil Gibran, On Love, that “love is sufficient unto love”, That love is a spectrum of many colours that when those different shades converge, they reproduce their alliance in hue. And that’s a little like love.
That those intimate reflexes one gets when their ears are sealed off with sweet offerings, in tones and letters, in glances and melody, the rallying giggles that upsets one’s stomach for a split second. That sensation, that is only but a strand in a field of growing seedlings, one strand of follicular growths. Just one expression in a diverging pool of action and responses.
That love, it is understanding, it is meaningful ability to challenge and settle difference, it is open and open minded. It is unrestrictive and unchained. It doesn’t motivate a taming, it carries like the wind, the journeyed flight of autumnal sweet-gum leaves. It does not manifest in a tinge that is jealousy, which we accept as positive socialisation. Rather, it trusts, it misses, and yearns for unguarded and uncapped presence locked in as braided fingers, loosened in time to let life breathe.
And when it suffocates, trigger and evoke negative responses to slights, then it may be turning. Contaminated by that which makes us human in our fragility, of which taints our being. This does not mean a complete souring of its founding pillars. Love, it begs for vigilance and constant introspection. So that when it begins to sour as turned wine at sea bay, those negative provocations are tendered and pulled back from the edge of the ledge, cured of effervescence.
Love, it makes mistakes. Natural mistakes in speech and angst but it does not scratch the thighs of another. It does not assume that pretence. Love forgives lesser sins, of speech and angst, in forgetting and delayed remembrance. Love is not vicious, rather it strips life of malevolent cells. Love cures a natural inclination to be spiteful and baleful.
Love betters, Love is empathic. Not only to those who tend sweet offerings in one’s gut but outwards, beyond raised bars and gated communities, beyond border lines birds can’t see, beyond seas that split nations apart, beyond distinct tribal marks and skin tones, beyond differing receivers of our supplications and compasses we prostrate to, beyond the garbs we throw on our backs and the slides we coaster on.
In its all encompassing, it is sufficient. In its deficiency, it depresses.
Himyarite 