Could you be love?
You ever feel love yet? What does it feel like? Over the years, several songs have been sung and plenty poems have been spun, weaving wonderful words, waxing sentimentally about that feeling called love. And from Miriam Makeba’s ‘love tastes like strawberry’ to Cynthia Schloss’ ‘you look like love’ and ‘the sound of love’ by the Bee Gees, all of our senses have been figuratively used to express and illustrate love. Maybe smell is the only exception. Ahm, you ever wonder what’s the odour of love? When you smell it you tell me! Seriously speaking though, here’s the thing. In the overwhelming majority of cases, references to love, especially in music and poetry, is usually restricted to the circumstance of an intimate relationship. In fact, most people nowadays hardly ever take that overused and abused four-letter word outside of the context of a physical engagement spelt with three letters. That’s why most men, the younger ones especially, will quickly tell you that they respect men but they only love women.
Sad, eeh? So physical attraction and casual affinity is now often confused with love, to the extent that somebody’s declaration of falling in love is just an invitation to the expectation of falling in bed.
A FANTASY
Thanks to some of our most loved pop songs, the magnitude of love has been reduced to a fantasy; a magical intangible that captures and engulfs our being — something you ‘fall into’, or a severely undervalued transactional engagement, also called sex.
Of course, anybody who is old enough and smart enough to know anything about anything, knows that love is much bigger than that.
Those were some of the thoughts I pondered last week as I was asked to talk at a Jamaica Cultural Development Commission consultation for culture clubs from the parishes of St Elizabeth, Mandeville and Clarendon.
Held at Munro College in the cool hills of Malvern, the theme of the event was ‘Engendering a culture of love’.
I closed the talk by pointing to Bob Marley’s poignant question in song, ‘could you be loved and be love?’
Yeah, we can see, smell, taste, hear and feel love. But how about trying to BE love? How? Attempt it nuh!
Take a Bible and find 1 Corinthians 13 Verses 4 to 13. And depending on the version, everywhere it says ‘charity’ or ‘love’ replace it with your name or the word ‘I’.
Yeah, being love is hard, yes. But try!
box-mi-back@hotmail.com