Love & Freedom

"Amour l'enfant liberte."

(translation: Love is the child of freedom)
Tattoo on the wrist of a server at Michael's Uptown Cafe

Love cannot be coerced, bought, sold, or produced on demand. Love grows out of both freedom from and freedom to. In order to truly love, you must be free from any sort of external pressure to be different than you are. You must also have the freedom to choose who, when, where and how you love. Finally, you must be free of your past. You must transcend both past hurts and past ecstasies in order to be fully present and capable of love.

Love is thus intrapersonal as well as interpersonal. Not only is it necessary to love your self before you can truly love another (as every pop psychologist worth his Leo Buscaglia tapes will tell you), but also you must let go of anything that is not love. Freedom is the fertile soil for love, and freedom can only be found in being fully open to the present moment.

So, today, focus upon freeing yourself, loving yourself, loving others, and loving what is. For ultimately love is not personal but transpersonal. It is unlimited and totally non-discriminatory. Like the sunshine and the rain it warms or soaks all equally.

But the really cool thing is that not only does love grow out of freedom, the reverse is also true -- freedom grows out of love. When someone is loved it frees them to be fully and authentically themself. Love helps them to see that they, like we, are indeed always, already free and always, already love.