There is Nothing More Important in the World Than Love

Love is love.

Love is caring for other people, for yourself, and the ones you bring into this world or at your orbit through kind acts or even barbs. We as people, we are very weird.

So, considering outside of the LGBTQ slogan for a minute, consider just how powerful love has proven to be. Scientifically, emotionally, psychologically, and societally.

"Humans have been known to suddenly gain the strength necessary to lift objects more than a dozen times their own weight."

Such a phenomenon is coined as hysterical strength, appearing aptly, when a person undergoes great amounts and times of distress. However, it's most documented instance is from Mothers who, out of love for their children, would lift a car off them with their bare hands.

Love then, evokes such powerful, all-consuming fervor and passions that while sometimes poisonous when not navigated or tempered properly, can also elicit the physical responses necessary to numb our own pain, drive our bodies and logical mind to its brink with adrenaline to a simple image... when that singular person we love more than life itself could leave us forever. We go to any lengths to protect and preserve them.

Love is both one of the most beautiful phenomena of our human race; immortalized in Romantic era artistry, comprising thousands upon millions of pages in fancy script poetry of odes, ballads, villanelles, sonnets... and also one of the most dangerous. As anyone with a middle school crush can attest, love hurts. It is such a succulent, divine pain in our chests, making us dizzy and so deliriously happy our idealized match.

Grief grips ever harder, in direct proportion to how much a person loves another. Whether they're a pet, a brother, a friend, or a partner. And God forbid anyone feel the death of a beloved child whether they are your son, sister, daughter, brother, cousin, godsibling/daughter/son/brother/sister.

A child, who loves so freely. Without ulterior motive or even expecting that love to be returned. They may love and show grace to the most terrible of people.

Love... truly decides how we move forward or how we defile and commit evil.

Crime of Passion, Crimes of lust and obsession. "Emotional Distress." The legalese to confront the red in our sights when even the mentally sound and happy kill.

In one fictionalized, powerful instance in the face of a sociopath who has already killed. The child of a father who as only a father would, comfort that child all the same whilst under his deluded lies. But did he deserve even then, to be shot down? The child killer was only ten years old.

The man pled "emotional distress" in legal proceeding. His son had been killed, who was to say that when his killer grew up-- at eighteen-- he wouldn't kill again?

"I will never kill again," was his promise. As he acknowledges the horrible crime he had committed.

And think of many creations.

Artists and writers, much like myself or anyone who reads and appreciates my work today. Everyone has come together on this page to share their love of writing. Who can create the poignant and powerful quotes we repeat or emulate the works they themselves love. With tender, reverent hands, imparting unfettered creativity and their own fond little twists. Such love and passion for what we do and our work is why writing competitions and forums exist in almost as many people there are in this world.

Painters who have made it their lives to smear white canvases with color and feeling, life, death, war, and peace... who have something to say. To perhaps the mysterious Mona Lisa, who was the love of Da Vinci, and wanted to properly capture what immesurable beauty he saw in her. Or Freida Kahlo, amidst grief, wished to honor her family, her ill husband, and even herself who suffered so much, lost so much in her life yet all the while persevered. Learning to appreciate and even immortalize her scars within her artworks. She encapsulates to so many just what it is to lose a child, how even a human life who has not existed is loved and remembered, still connected to the Mother who loved them so deeply.

As well as those who had something to say toward the world at large. For what they loved that was being defiled, they put into pastel colors or the gloom of depressive grey or soft hues of blue.

And so with years past we in the present "love and adore" these artists and their work. We seek to understand, to translate, and to preach the nuances of their work. We hold it in esteem, we adulate them in museums, galleries, and private collections. To this form of love we reward with all the fame and glamour enviable to the masses. So desired, so bitterly from our reach. A much more possessive, yearning kind of love.

Love is baked into human culture. So universal, only distinct in its expressions. In every culture we place emphasis on the love of a mother; how honorable it is to give birth and give yourself to the life you so yearned and have now created. Who will love you in turn by sheer instinct. We place such heavy importance on our ceremony of binding love between young men and women with their partners.

How a bride wears white, how a ceremony may be before God by a chosen priest, how family and friends all gather to watch. How to seat both sides of the family acutely aware of the differences in tradition, cultures, and class of people. Which many times are overcome in the best of love stories. An integral piece. Whom you love because of differences rather than despite. A bride is often at her most beautiful in preparation for and during her wedding. The husband has now matured into a fully blossomed man when he can set aside his desires and his pride to be wholly his wife's provider, her protector, and her one and only.