The Essence of Daily Living – Love

Love is the thing that makes life worthy of living. Everybody would like to write like Khalil Gibran that “Love has no desire but to fulfill itself. To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving”. We would like to receive warm love and bask in its sunshine. But the thing about love is that it is elusive. It keeps running away as we chase it. In fact, if we want to receive love we must first learn how to give love.
Finding love is difficult because we raise all sorts of protection for fear of suffering or of rejection. “Your task is not to seek love, but to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it” says Rumi.  
Sages and seers say that God made earth and all the material worlds so that Soul could learn to give and receive love. “Ye know that the greatest of God’s qualities is love. For love is the greatest and most sublime force of the universe. Through love the divine qualities of God will shine like the radiant light of the morning sun… All things will gravitate to thee if ye will let love enter thine own hearts, without compromise” says Paul Twitchell in Stranger by the River.
The difference between human love and divine love is that divine love is unconditional, with no strings attached.
Paul Twitchell adds: “Love inspires the heart, first as human love. This is the love which desires to serve its beloved, husband, wife, children, family, friends, or human ideals, and the things of this world, during thy existence here in this life.
Then the heart becomes refined by selflessness and love possesses thee.”
Warm love can be given to those who are close to us while charity, or goodwill, which is a detached form of love, can be given to others. This is the purpose of life.