I simply can not imagine a life without love.

It is something we have no control over, it is a force of nature, it is something that just is. It is not ours to command, it is not something that we should try and dissect and understand, it is something we just need to accept. Love is the one thing that can unite us, too many people today live in fear when they should be living from a place of love, can you imagine what that would be like. If we all were able to meet each other from a place of love.

As a children I had some crazy ideas of what love was, because I grew up in a violent home. My father was aggressive towards my mother and they fought all the time. In my eyes that was what adult love was. Both my father and mother were aggressive towards me, my father more so, yet everyone where I was told that my parents loved me, so love for me was aggressive and painful. I now know that it was not real love, but it did have a huge influence on how I viewed love between people. I viewed it as Aggressive, difficult and very painful. Luckily for me I relearnt what it really can be, through my friends, my partners and my children.

But when I walked away from my home and into natures embrace, there I discovered real love. It is so hard to define what love is, because we love in so many different ways. But my love for nature has always been unconditional, I am constantly in awe, constantly inspired, constantly being replenished by her. I feel so protective of nature and also so honoured to be part of something so beautiful and real. My love for nature has kept me and keeps me whole, through all the many roller-coasters I have been on so far in this life. Because in loving nature I am loving myself, accepting myself and all love must start from self.

Sure I have went through periods of my life where I struggled with my self esteem, but that was due to how other people treated me, that was inflicted by others, who reflected their lack of self love onto me. At the time I did not realize that, hind sight sure is a great thing. But when we suffer at the hands of others, it forces us to recreate ourselves, to become stronger. But I am going off point here. We are talking about love, more specifically about having loved and lost.

To be honest I do not like to associate the word lost with love, because when you love someone you never lose them, you carry a piece of that person around with you for the rest of your life. Okay their physical presence is not there. Yes there is pain, but that is the love that you hold for them. A close friend of mine returned to the earth in February, she had been living with breast cancer and she was a warrior. She taught me so much, she was a real Goddess and she really gifted me with so much. I do not get to be in her presence anymore, but I have not lost her, I feel her around me, I feel her energy, her love. Her physical form may have left but her love burns bright in the world around me.

I recently separated from my partner and father of my girls, I definitely loved him, when we first met it was like fireworks, we had such a electrifying connection, that it literally floored us both. We became completely consumed by our love for one another. The above song by Bjork does quiet a good job of describing how I felt. It was indeed a force of nature. But as life went on and we became parents those feelings lessen, we were too busy to really find time for one another. The love was less intense and in the end we grew apart. But I do not regret anything. Every person I have loved has taught me so much about myself, I have been gifted with more insight and more awareness. I have learnt more and more about what it is to love and be loved.Yes of course it hurts when I am no longer with them, but life hurts and we are sculpted by those who we have loved. When we separate from a partner, it is like we are rubbing away a layer of ourselves, until eventually we become more and more the person who we are meant to be. We are being shaped into fine diamonds!

And then there is the love I feel for my children, wow that goes above and beyond everything. That love is limitless, it grows and expands everyday, I never would have thought such a thing was possible, but oh boy it is. It fills me up and I literally am overflowing with love for them. That very first moment I got to hold my daughters, got to look into their eyes, I really felt like i could have burst into light, the love I felt was so intense. I will always hold onto that feeling, to that discovery for the rest of my life.

Love is a force, such a powerful force for healing, for life. We are nothing without love!

8 Pillars of TribeSteemUp

Big Big Thank You To @byn for designing my logo.