Love

A black and white image of a woman standing in front of a mirror. Her reflection is leaning out of the mirror to hug her.

“One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.”
~ Paulo Coelho

The prompt for Revelations this week is this quote about love by Paulo Coelho, which I found myself immediately drawn to. One of the things I think we spend so much of our time doing is trying to decide whether or not we are worthy of love; whether we deserve it, whilst longing for it and generally parcelling it out carefully like it is a limited resource that should only be given in particular circumstances. That all feels like bollocks to me. Love just exists – it is, and it should be celebrated and enjoyed and not dissected. We are all deserving of love, anyway.

I think I love easily. People matter to me, and anyone I have any kind of connection to is loved by me in some way or another. I think I feel too easily sometimes. I can’t watch the news and I struggle not to over-empathise with the stories I hear and the pain that I witness but I don’t care because I don’t think love is ever a bad thing, and here it is anyway. It just exists.

The most transformative kind of love though is the kind we find for ourselves. Our beautiful, imperfect, fragile and flawed selves. I think that is the kind of love that we need to be striving for most of all, though it is also the hardest. If we hold the premise that everyone is deserving of love, then it makes sense to start here.

February Photo Fest 2023


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