An Ode To Love
by Dino Hadjinicola (some excerpts taken from julian barnes Levels of Life)
Dearest beloved,
I have always felt it more felicitous to write something meaningful and personal rather that the banal platitudes that are usually found in the impersonal plastic templates that we call wedding cards. Below is an ode for you and for the reason that you are now married: love.
You put together two people who have not been put together before, and something new is made… and the world is changed. Other people may not notice how profoundly true this is at the time, but that doesn’t matter. The world has been changed nonetheless, and you are now changed as well.
To fall in love. To let go of our fears. To see the world for what it really is. It’s beauty. It’s majesty. Our senses are heightened. We suddenly slow down and hear things we didn't notice before, the wind, the ocean. We suddenly freeze and see things we previously missed, like the sun shining. Things look different because for once we are actually looking at things. Usually we tend to look through things and through people. What did you see, really see, yesterday? And what will you see today?
The sky is no longer the same colour, the moon no longer the same shape, air no longer feels the same, food doesn’t taste the same. Every word you knew has changed its meaning. Everything that was once stable and firm to you has become as insubstantial as a gust of wind, and every gust of wind has become so solid that you can touch and feel it. This is where language falls apart and is left behind. How can this transcendent feeling, this force, be brought onto a piece of paper with some black ink marks on it? It cannot.
Van Gogh once said that love will always bring trouble with it... but that in its favour, it also offers an unalloyed energy and a soaringly beautiful stimulation for life that cannot be resisted. He was right. This force, this undeniable compulsion to come together with one another. We all know when it is present and we all know when it is absent. And in spite of its ethereal, indefinable nature, we all know that force is love.
The infinite creative force that brought into being all phenomena, that compels one cell to become two, that heals wounds, that spins atoms into planets, that binds us all together in commonality... is love. And all language can do is rest on top of it, or merely point to it, never quite able to really describe it.
Love precedes all, is beyond all and is within all. It is within you… because we were made out of love, with love, to love and be loved.
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