That was a really nice poem, Beth!

I wonder, what do we all mean by the word "love"?

Those old Greeks, to whose early explorations into life, the universe, humans, and Everything Else, we even now still owe so much, felt that one word was not enough - they used 3 - eros, philos, and agape, for sexual, intellectual, and an all-embracing sense of love. One of the problems humans have is that they can only think in symbols, mostly in words or equations, and without the words we cannot define differences or meanings that well. Two examples:
1) In German, one uses the word "Gluecklich", to mean both "lucky" and "happy". The notion that one might be exceedingly lucky yet still profoundly miserable, ( as in you won the lottery and/but felt suicidal for being in the wrong body!) is hard for a person raised exclusively in a German culture to comprehend.
2) In all Indo-European languages we define causes and effects, but in Chinese they have a word (no pictograms available here) that indicates that two things "like to" happen together, but does not distinguish cause from effect. This makes a profound difference in how people raised in a Chinese and a European culture, think.

When my wee sister and I were small, we never ever saw our Mummy and Daddy kiss or cuddle. Sometimes in the evenings after we had been put to bed, we would hear them arguing, about money or rather the lack of it, mostly, and at times my wee sister would come to my bedroom and we would both hide behind the clothes hanging in the wardrobe in my room, because we were afraid. We even discussed whether they had ever loved each other - well at least twice they must have, we decided, because here we were to prove it ( obviously we were thinking of Eros here!). Yet many, many years later, I saw how my Mummy slept every night beside the decaying body of my Daddy, fed him with a spoon, washed him when he was incontinent, and I wept for admiration of her Love for him as well as for sorrow at his decline, and held her in my now stronger arms as she had me when our positions were reversed, to comfort her when he died. Then I revised my ideas about "what is love?" For our parents, "love" seemed to mean "a duty of care that one willingly takes on".

Which reminds me of a time when I was moved to a place where the only school was one run by the Church, and where in a religious indoctrination class a particularly dimwitted boy who had given "the wrong answer" to the old witch who had been dragged out of retirement to teach us after the real teachers had been taken into the war effort, had lost her temper and was beating him round the head as she screamed "What is god? (Wham) God is love! (wham)". My militant atheism may well have started then, as I was left with the firm impression that whatever this god thing was, it was something to keep well away from!

Once I was doing research into the behaviour of woodlice. I developed such a still-lasting love for these poor wee beasties, that many others found it odd, but my Prof. told me he felt the same about his special creatures, the water fleas (Daphnia spp). I guess this is like Philos.

When I was engaged in work in a vast mental hospital, trying to find out the biochemical causes
behind psychotic and neurotic illnesses, I was filled with a sadness and deep concern for all these unhappy people I worked with. I guess that might be Agape.

I have been married, twice. In each case we both loved each other very much. But eventually love dies, and then what follows? We remain friends. I have had children - the love one feels when one holds one's new baby for the first time, that is pure animal instinct. But not anything less for that. The feelings of pride one has when they are grown up and achieve their own achievments, that is some other feeling of "love". And the love one feels, when one's third baby is born in great pain, suffering and dying within the hour, that is so full of despair and loss and shame and anger at this perverse universe for inflicting this on a so tiny and innocent child - that is another kind of love altogether. Each of my spouses were so different and our feelings for each other were so different too...

I am thinking now that this word, LOVE, has as many meanings as there are combinations of individual people and things to feel it for.

Briar