Love Is ... ...
LOVE IS learning to let go of a relationship
Love is unconditional – no payment due in return
Love is the sound of your best mate returning home and hearing
the kitbag thrown on the hall-mat,
his whistle and sigh of relief at arriving back,
his laughter, giggle and rolling of the eyes
Love is watching with joy and anguish the arrivals and departure lounges
at harbours and airports, railway stations and coach parks
Love is walking the beach with only your mate’s company in your mind’s eye
Love is walking the beach with only your mate’s company in your mind’s eye
Love is standing aside
Love is being there when required but quietly absenting oneself
when presence would make your mate uncomfortable or put him
or his friends and girlfriends under pressure
Love is trying with all your might to see the other point of view
Love is being able to express yourself physically without fear
of retribution, offence, lock-up or persecution
Love is refusing to condemn, whatever the circumstances
Love is wanting the best for your mate and your friends, and
being willing to sacrifice to enable them to achieve
Love is that first glimpse between new born baby and Mum
Love is holding on to Dad tightly
Love is being able to laugh at oneself to thereby ease a burden
or stress for others
Love is to be able to kiss with genuine affection and without
sexual connotation
Love is to refrain from even attempting to kiss if it would offend
Love is to kiss and be passionate and life giving
Love is without prejudice or indictment
Love is in the smile, in the grief, in the moment, in the hurried
exchanges
Love is being able to hold on to one’s sisters with all your
might
Love stretches across the oceans
Love is waking and feeling the warmth of your mate next to you
Love is agreeing not to go all the way if the other does not
desire it even though you do
Love is in the tissue and fibre of every moment of the day
Love is in the sound of the playground full of children
Love is in Grandma’s voice
Love is Mum’s smile that beams a million unspoken words, and
eyes that can write a book in the flash of an instant
Love is in the music that we love to listen to as it brings to mind
the people that mean the most to us, both near and far,
in this country and in far distant lands,
memories of friends who have suddenly walked out of our lives
without comment or contact, so that we do not even know how
ever again to speak with them, or hold them, or love them
Love is being able to hang on to those memories though,
and not get upset, but to rejoice that we had them for a time
and at least we have these memories that will become more
priceless and precious as the years unfold – memories
that not even the guards can take away
as we sit alone in the cell
Love is a nephew’s first tentative steps
Love is in a nephew’s first attempts at worldly advice two
decades later
Love is in a nephew’s face - beaming as he walks the aisle with
his Bride
Love is that mad dash to hospital in the early hours
when your best mate is on the brink of death because
of an horrendous attempt to end it all
Love is in the embrace
Love is hearing your sister walk into the Intensive Care Unit
and seeing the smile for which she is famous
Love is genuine when it is with compassion and without
restriction
Love is your friend’s voice on the other end of the line
– the unexpected text message – the unexpected longhand letter
that drops through the letter box
Love is in the salutation ‘with all my love’;
‘with love and positive vibes’
Love is in that joyous moment when, against all the odds,
the mediator has succeeded in bringing siblings back together
Love is that excruciating feeling – that crushing desire
to intrude into your best mate’s life but somehow against all the odds
managing to restrain from doing so,
and that thrill at hearing of your mate’s accomplishments
Love is in ordinary acts of unsolicited friendship in the street,
at the gym, on the train, on board ship, at the garage, in the air
– when you’ve dropped something and it’s given back to you
Love is the joy of seeing family accept your friends unconditionally
Love is gently touching the rudder
Love is giving encouragement and refusing to knock people
down
Love is turning a blind eye regardless of what religious pundits say
Love is learning to accept age and decline with dignity
Love is refusing to believe that GOD does not have a personal plan
specifically designed with only you in His Mind
Love is sharing those moments of terrible sorrow
when all you and your mate want to do
is to hold onto each other and cry your eyes out
Love is patient, kind and does not question or probe
Love gives and does not take conditionally
Love is gentle
Love sees the best in a person and ignores the faults
Love is the light of the world, and when that light is
extinguished man cannot survive
Love triumphs over all
Love defeats adversity
Love hates evil
True love redresses man’s perception of what is evil in his eyes
because of silly superstitions and outdated irrelevant theology
Love does not discriminate
Love does not persecute
Love does not marginalize
Love does not seek to control or manipulate
Love is sharing space and giving space
Love is sharing home during a crisis
Love is in the chatter and in the silence of mates
Love is not using friends to occupy your time
Love is going for a coffee with friends,
or going for a drink down the pub
Love is not feeling bitter or downhearted
when your mate fails to turn up as planned
or to make a promised call
Love is thinking about your mate when he’s gone
Love is planning the best for your mate
Love is knowing that somehow he’s always there
Love is receiving a lovely photograph from him
by hand or through the post
Love is being in love and keeping that to yourself
Love is growing distant to protect a relationship
and to protect yourself as a means of self-preservation
20 November 2021
All Rights Reserved
© Kenneth Thomas Webb 2022
Author Note
Liverpool, a Wednesday, very warm, the sun setting at around 8.30 pm, 28 July 2004, my note informs me.
I had moved up north in June 2003, and the feel of Liverpool was akin to putting on a favourite glove, just the right size, light and airy, enabling the hand to breathe.
I had always set a high score by this when wearing uniform, and I still do. I was very happy, I recall, and I must have been asking many questions as I sat quietly before going for a late evening stroll on the seafront.
My note also tells me of my inner search… what IS love?
Or, more candidly, in my lawyer’s mind-frame it would have been, how do I define love?
The engine of my mind was clearly thinking about relationships, and the parting, hence picking up the pen and writing that first line :
Love is learning to let go of a relationship
Frieden und Ruhe - peace and calm - alighted the room, and as I penned the last three lines, I quietly placed the pen on the script, picked up my wallet and wandered down. Ah! The sea air. The salt in the wind! What joy. Later, weeks I think, I realised that this was my attempt at defining this most elusive sense and that it was, therefore, autobiographical. It is not, therefore, wide-ranging, but in retrospect, I can see that my mind 17 years ago was already compartmentalising and establishing the countless dimensions of life, our multiverses, and our Universe.
It was published in the first anthology Idle Thoughts An Anthology of Poetry and Prose by Spiderwize in September 2009, again in the sequel Meanderings in October 2011 (hardback) and, later still by request, in the third anthology BGBBW in August 2013.
A friend on the other side of the world wrote to say that he had copied it onto the noticeboard in the kitchen on campus and that it had started circulating, ‘and do you mind?’ We had quite a laugh. A very, very close friend, a fellow writer and artist asked if a line could be used in the song he was composing. Of course!
I mention my nephew as an infant, as a young man endeavouring to give worldly advice to an uncle, and then seeing him walk the aisle with his bride. What a wonderful day that was. Time moves us through the stages of each age, so the infant is now enjoying his fourth decade, ably assisted by three tearaway sons ~ 12-16-18 …‘no Unk! Going on 13 - 16 - 19! Come on, get with it or we’ll think you’re losing it! ~ and his wife - his best mate - ably keeping them all in check!
What pleases me in writing this Dimension is that doing so is due to the superb artwork by Alen Rojnic via Unsplash. It is as if I can imagine future generations looking at this same portrait of a beautiful couple, and one saying to the others, blimey, Gran and Grandad are quite something aren’t they? No wonder we look the way we do.
End
Ken Webb is a writer and proofreader. His website, kennwebb.com, showcases his work as a writer, blogger and podcaster, resting on his successive careers as a police officer, progressing to a junior lawyer in succession and trusts as a Fellow of the Institute of Legal Executives, a retired officer with the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, and latterly, for three years, the owner and editor of two lifestyle magazines in Liverpool.
He also just handed over a successful two year chairmanship in Gloucestershire with Cheltenham Regency Probus.
Pandemic aside, he spends his time equally between his city, Liverpool, and the county of his birth, Gloucestershire.
In this fast-paced present age, proof-reading is essential. And this skill also occasionally leads to copy-editing writers’ manuscripts for submission to publishers and also student and post graduate dissertations.
