'Love' - Salon at Blacks, December 20, 2003
23 participants
Jeremy Ackerman, Bruce, Altshuler, N’Deaye Ba, Michael, Barnett ,Oliver Bennett, Margaret Blackburn, Breda Bredin, Louise Camras, Janet Cardiff, , Sacha Craddock, Richard Dyer, Chantal Quigne, Jenni Lomax, Rut Blees Luxembourg, Giuseppe Mascoli, George Burles, Miller, Will Palin, Uscha Pohl, Sylvia Ziranek, James Putnam, Martin Sexton, Gavin Turk, Christopher Woodward.

Love

To love someone else you have to love yourself. Love is not to be found in someone else, but in ourselves: we simply awaken to it. But in order to do that, we need the other person. The universe only makes sense when we have someone to share our feelings with. But love is very different from attachment. Love does not mean indulging the person loved - we cannot prove we love someone. Love means to give yourself and it is unconditional since it has no cause. It is not like money and cannot be a transaction – it must not be – “if you love me, I will love you”. Love can only be a completely free gift – nothing is expected in return. I choose to love someone, because I choose to love them. For no reason. If there is a reason, it is not love it is a transaction.

Some people surrender themselves to love without a second thought, hoping to find in passion the solutions to all their problems. They make the other person responsible for their happiness and blame them for possible unhappiness. Love makes us forget ourselves and our wishes, problems, pains, sufferings – we put our attention on someone else’s needs and it can make us stop eating, sleeping, working, feeling at peace. Passionate love demonstrates this fragility and sense of abandon. Love implies commitment to the person loved and means to protect, cherish and nurture them and create the environment which allows and encourages their growth but means supplying challenges. But although love encourages change it is not about trying to change the person loved. The great aim of every human being is to understand the meaning of total love it gives people confidence and strength with words of encouragement and seems to be infectious … if we give our love, we get more love back.