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What is love?
It depends
on the rung we are standing on.
There are as many loves
as there are people.
A long hierarchy,
from the lowest
to the highest,
from sex
to super-consciousness.
Many layers.
Many planes.
At the bottom
love is politics.
Power politics
with a thin coat of sweetness.
We speak of love
but the deeper movement
is to dominate,
to possess,
to make the other smaller.
It is mostly unconscious.
A bitter pill
sugar-coated.
That is why
this love creates more misery
than joy.
Ninety-nine percent bitter.
One percent sugar
that does not last.
In the beginning of an affair
we taste the sweetness.
Soon the coating wears away
and the politics appear
jealousy,
possessiveness,
the quiet continuous war
between two people
still using the word "love."
Many of us eventually stop
trying with human beings.
It becomes easier
to love a dog, a cat, a car.
They do not fight back.
They do not try to dominate in
return.
The arrangement stays simple.
Human love,
at this level,
has often become a kind of hell
two people
at each other's throats
while still calling it love.
Only at the highest peak
does the nature of love change.
There it is no longer a
relationship.
It becomes a state of being.
A different perfume is
released.
This love is not a bargain.
It is given
for the sheer joy of giving.
It does not need to own.
It does not need to win.
It does not need the other
to be less.
It simply is.
And in that simple is-ness
it surpasses
every joy the lower loves
promised
and failed to keep.
Most of us only know
the political kind.
A few touch the other.
The difference
is not in the person we love.
It is in the plane
from which we love.
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