“We learn early that we cannot control love. Love controls us. 

It can possess us. Love gives us the stamina to take care of people we love, sometimes for decades—simply because we love them. 

Love calls us to forgive, and to be patient, and to endure, and to have compassion. Love often demands more of us than we think we can give—only to discover we can give that much (and more) if we have to. 

There are people we wish we could stop loving. Life would be easier if only we could stop loving them. And there are people we wish we could love more.  Love has a mind of its own. 

And then there is the wish that we could be loved more by certain others. We cannot make others love us; and we ourselves can only love those we do. That’s the way of personal love. 

But beyond personal love is something else: impersonal, universal love. Love as love. Love itself. It’s the difference between the personal light bulb in your room, which does provide some light, and the sun—which is light itself. One is personal and the other belongs to no one. It just is. 

That type of love blasts the walls off your personal heart, and you feel love—sunlight—for no particular reason at all. You don’t need to love a particular person in order to know love. You don’t have to have a target, a purpose, a “special someone” to know what love—or light—is. 

You know because you are standing in the direct path of the sun. You feel it. You know it. And that’s when you know love is the light that all living creatures crave the most.”

Excerpt From

Intimate Conversations with the Divine

Caroline Myss