Loving Ghosts & Strangers

Love has been defined into pieces, broken, mutilated. It's a gift denounced and mispronounced like a foreign tongue. It must know how God feels.

I've wondered lately more about how love works and less about its particular chemistry or duration. I want to understand more of what forms it takes, how it moves.


This curiosity is due to my noticing frequent BURSTS of "love" for others, near- or perfect strangers when something they've created causes a warm stirring within me, a feeling which ranges from deep enduring appreciation to a brief obsession. I don't have to be physically near the source. I only need exposure to a person's mind which can initially arise from words or any form of artful expression, but once the connection is made, some essences are suddenly free to move about and can appear to me from out of nowhere.


I can feel a person's mind/soul in a painting or essay, a photograph they're in or connected to, an inanimate object they've touched or a song. The feeling can be so strong for these minds I hardly "know" that suddenly their essence envelopes and inspires me to speak out loud to an otherwise empty room, "I love you." It makes no sense.


This phenomenon leads me to believe that love is ubiquitous, a ghostly ethereal breath which flows in and around us when the portals of our souls are open. It is not as a ping pong ball exchanged between a mere two, but an intoxicating vapor infusing welcoming space, free to those who expand comprehension of this love to "All" rather than the weak and fragile "I".


We'll never place this immortal vapor in a jar or hang it on a wall; it is as God has been described, an energy with no circumference but a center everywhere.


Maybe these individuals to whom I feel an immediate connection are other like minds, soul mates, or mirrors of shared traits. In this everywhere of love, these likenesses can share the same space in an instant despite the sometimes great physical distance between them. As Richard Bach once said about loving others, "There's no such place as far away."


The feeling transcends all space/time because I've shared this euphoria with lost loves - a mother, brother, best friend and others - those lost only due to a physical disconnect, which seems to intensify the spiritual connection.


I've felt it when reading the words of those long dead, Sylvia Plath entering my dilated pupils as the intuitive twinge of her husband's infidelity is finally confirmed, "The truth loves me."  I felt it with Henry Miller's admonition to "Forget yourself" in order to be fully present.   I felt it as Michel de Montaigne gripped my soul from his 16th century post, "There is, beyond all my reasoning, and beyond all that I can specifically say, some inexplicable power of destiny that brought about our union."


Invisible limitless transit seems the preferred mode of passage for ubiquitous love - a spiritual plane where our souls move about freely, appearing anywhere sans time. Love has no limits, it cannot die; it needs no words, airplanes or maps. Love knows what it knows without need for proof or reason as it travels along messengers called you and me, tiny familiar posts connecting along the path of forever. This energy surges through us all.

And I love the feeling of being carried away.