The red hearts and teddy bears fill the stores and adorn the entrances around the world for that one evening in the year when love is actually celebrated … the feast of St. Valentine. On the occasion, the thoughts about love naturally fill the air and fill everyone with freshness and certain blossom hard to see for the rest of the year. It’s a day for love to flourish.

Standing by the side of a legendary lake to the north of Cairo, the thought of what really are the features of real love? My friends C. and Y. were discussing the sophisticated language of an Indian Guru who talked of love in a simplistic yet graspable fashion. The thought that comes to head at the mention is: what is real love after all, and whether there’s anything with that definition that exists in the world!

Motherly love is considered the top of the pyramid of human love. The affection, sacrifice, generosity, giving without limits and ultimate patience and security in love are all simple facets of that motherly love which is an experience enjoyed by most individuals as a birth right. Yet motherly love lacks vision sometimes and suffers a natural bias to her offspring. One would wonder how all the love and affection turn into absolute mindless battle to prove her little one is better than any other little one and is always right! Unless all mothers can look at all children as their own, then motherly love will always lack inclusion and will continue being instinctive. (N.B. I might change my mind by Mother’s Day … we’ll see!!)

Passionate love between two soul mates was also considered somewhere at the top of symbols of love. But that’s a very hard one to describe or measure against. As much as it includes all the good words of the past and future, it also includes within its seeds the doubt and fear for oneself. More than anything, this love is transitory, and unless replaced by something grander in the future, it is bound to die away as its flames diminish.

Godly love maybe comes as the benchmark for the concept. In almost all religions there’s the considerate, merciful and loving Deity which responds to prayers, brings the flood on time and sprouts the green from the land. The ultimate perfection of that love is the non-discriminating and non-changing secure form of response to supplication. Yet is that not also the love of the farmers to their land and the patience to tender and wait, and the agility to learn and adapt over the years; altogether rendering those miracles close to heart? Is this the appropriately termed love of God? How about the God who made a marvelous heavens for all humans asking them to enjoy it? Isn’t this really the Earth in its original state which we’re marvelously destroying? Is this what love offers? Or one has to be dead to learn it?

“Who do you exactly think yourself to be in order to judge love,” a wise voice resounded from somewhere unknown to me. “Look around you’ll see it.”

And there, right in front of my eyes, two birds were singing on a tree surrounded by salty water of the legendary lake.

Stupid me!!!! How can anyone search for a meaning of love outside of themselves?

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