With a technician’s spirit, and once I had modelled my soul (see: https://distillinggrief.com/2023/04/24/a-model-of-a-soul/ ) as an invisible reservoir where we store and release love, I realized that grief had emptied me of most or perhaps all of the love in my soul. We often hear people describe grief as a dark place, and the loss of our son had turned me into a black hole where love had died.
I needed to find or build love to refill my soul, but like most people, love had usually come easily to my life, so love was not entirely a conscious process for me. Over time, I sought a better definition of love to allow me to recognize and build the love that I needed to refill and rebuild my damaged soul.
Through grief, I have come to understand love as a form of life force energy that can flow without friction over great distances. In many ways the energy of love resembles the energy of light. Light from the beginnings of time carries images of our universe from the beginnings of time, if we have sensitive enough imaging hardware. Love from previous generations remains accessible to those who seek it. When we connect with our history and roots, we engage with the love that those generations have left behind as memories, when we gather as family we refresh and spread the bright love that remains.
Light can warm us over great distances, and light is required by life. We don’t fully understand light in our physical world, and we can’t fully understand love either. But, without needing to understand love, we can feel when the presence of love warms our soul, and we feel cold when there is no love.
Our definitions and understandings of both light and love are based almost entirely on perceptions of the effect of having the it, and of not having it. Light and darkness, the brightness of love and darkness of absence of love. The warmth of light, the warm feelings of love. We fear darkness, we fear a lack of love.
I believe that the energy, or at least the understanding of all of the past loves that we have shared remains accessible, if we look deep enough and are sensitive enough to remain connected to that love it will outlast our lifetime. The journey of grief is an exploration of those memories so that we can find them again when we need them later in life, either to teach or to be taught.
I also define part of love’s energy as a form of gravity, another not fully understood physical force. Gravity holds and cradles us to our planet while still allowing freedom of motion and change. It’s an invisible but universal force that is critical to the formation and existence of life itself. Love has gravity. We speak of being grounded in love, of building a life on a foundation of love, yet those foundations of love are weightless and can follow us through life.
We find much evidence of this gravity like force of love in our conscience. Our conscience is our soul’s self-protection mechanism. Nothing is more protective of the love contained in our soul than our conscience. Conscience reminds us to not put our life and the love that it contains at risk. Conscience reminds us to protect the lives and loves of those around us, even those people that we don’t know.
It is via conscience that we take pride in and protect our relationships of love, and so it is by conscience that we can love life over not just a moment, but over a lifetime. It is by conscience that others might feel safe in sharing love with us, and accepting love from us. Conscience forces us to try to give some love back when we accept love from someone, a process that amplifies the love shared and love received, which is the very basis of friendship, community and of lifetime love.
Love is a life force energy that flows between human souls through connections that are made because of human passions.
We are each born to an existence of unknown duration. We humans gather and share the life force energy of love to change our existence into a life that we love living. Love is what changes the existence we are born into into a life that we love living, so logically love is life.
Without enough love in our lives, we exist but don’t really live. This is evidenced in the numbness that begins grief. Deep pain from the wounds of loss, deep numbness as we lose our will to love life, in varying degrees, for a period beginning immediately after the death of a loved one. Going from loving life to merely existing is like being put in a prison, a hopeless hollow feeling. This is not fatal, it’s not permanent, it’s a call to action, a warning that your own personal reserves of love have dropped and need your attention.
We will become mechanics in grief, looking for the leaks of our own life force energy of love and repairing each of them so our reservoir (soul) can refill with love to a comfortable, or hopefully even joyous level of once again loving life.
Be well, seek peace, and understand that your own reserves of love are held in your soul so that you can love living this life, even after loss.