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A Natural History of Love | Brain Pickings


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Our long history of ambivalence towards love, Ackerman argues, is rooted in the necessary vulnerability and uncontrolled surrender true love requires:

We think of it as a sort of traffic accident of the heart. It is an emotion that scares us more than cruelty, more than violence, more than hatred. We allow ourselves to be foiled by the vagueness of the word. After all, love requires the utmost vulnerability. We equip someone with freshly sharpened knives; strip naked; then invite him to stand close. What could be scarier?

Egads.  Cue redemption!

Still, uncomfortable as it may be, love is also inescapable and subject to our own imagination in redefining it:

Common as child birth, love seems rare nonetheless, always catches one by surprise, and cannot be taught. Each child rediscovers it, each couple redefines it, each parent reinvents it. People search for love as if it were a city lost beneath the desert dunes, where pleasure is the law, the streets are lined with brocade cushions, and the sun never sets.

It is a strange thing, this search for love.

I always thought of love as something you give, not get.

 Love IS giving.

So why do so many people search for love when they could be giving?

Don't you believe most of us do both, to varying degrees?

Yes but I see a lot of focus on looking for love.

Don't you believe most of us do both, to varying degrees?

It is easier to give love than to search for it.

If I were a cow and if this information were grass, it would be in my second or third stomach right now.

Is that how milk gets made?

:-)   Yes.

Information goes in, milk comes out.

I believe bees make honey in their stomachs, too.

Floating to the Promised Land on the Milk of Human Kindness.

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