Thank you to @mountainjewel for proposing this week's question, and what a question it is. This is one that I think we have all asked ourselves, and we have played out in the movies and our songs and art. Love is that word that we all use, and yet it means something slightly different to us all. There are many kinds of love, and this week's question leaves it to us to decide if we are talking about a partner, or parent, friend or pet. We have nearly if not all suffered heartbreak in one form or another, and sometimes it can be so painful to suffer loss either through a breakup or even death. With such up's and downs we have done some soul searching this week to decide for ourselves what we feel.

If you have something to share on this question of the week please do share it either as a comment below or a post tagged ecotrain. It was nice to see others also posting this week already so thanks to @steemflow, @alignment, and @shilpavarma for joining us this week!

If you are are going through a difficult time or a loss right now I'm hope these posts can help you to heal and accept loss as a part of love and life.

@walkerland

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There are strands of love and loss etched through the woven tapestries of our lives. So much growth comes from a willingness to lean into those things that make us vulnerable. Loving isn't always easy though, most of the best things in life aren't. Sometimes lost love or cruel love leaves us scarred and torn. Some of us are left with rough edges. All the while, In spite of (or because of our wounds) there are others out there waiting to receive our love with warmth and reciprocation. Love always seems to find a way in.

Romantic love can be torture and greatness all at once.

My love and I have ripped into each others souls, hurt and healed and oh man have we ever loved with passion and vigour. When things get bumpy one of us has the sense to hold on tight.

@misslasvegas

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When I watched my friends go through the hell of working up to the funeral of their beloved son - the question lingered and the answer showed. Of course, they were going through something horrific. First the terrible news that their child had died and then having to arrange a funeral for someone you would have hoped to keep with you for a long, long time - longer than your own life, all the while mourning and remembering the boy that he was and the man that he should have become.
Seeing them this way, I would have gladly given an arm or a leg to bring him back.

And then the words:

"We were honored to have him with us, we loved him with all our hearts and all of our body and soul and he took a piece of us with him when he left us, but our love remains."

I heard it, not only out of the mouths of the parents, the family, the brother, the friends, us - but from their hearts, our hearts. Even though his death left a big gaping hole in our hearts - his memory remains and part of that hole is filled with love.

@holisticmom

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When we open our hearts and love others we are already setting ourselves up for loss. It's a natural process but one that affects us to varying degrees. Something that is dependant on who we've loved, the type of relationship and the amount of time and energy connection we have had. One thing for certain is that with each of these experiences come important lessons that help us to grow.

I think we've all been in a place where we have loved and lost. When the loss first occurs, the feelings are so raw. We are hurt and we need time to process them. The hurt also comes in varying degrees of strength. We love in many different forms. Love isn't just reserved for our sexual partners and those particular relationships. We love our parents, our siblings, our children, pets that come in and out of life, our extended family and friends. As most of you who read my posts know, I'm currently in the process of moving country. Our family has been living here for 3 years and over that time I have made some amazing friends. Some of whom I know will keep in touch and others I'm less likely to see or talk to again. Now I'm no stranger to this moving lark. I spent my teens moving around South East Asia but saying goodbye to those who we have shared fond memories with is hard on my heart.

@vegan.niinja

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You cant lose love, but you can lose people. That is a great difference. The love we experience for someone is not coming from the outside but from the inside. You cant lose love because you ARE love. We can get confused and believe that there is no love for us, but we have just forgotten that the love we are looking for, has been there the whole time, and still is. It is very painful to lose someone we love, but not because we lose the love, but because we miss their presence and the being.

And do we have a choice who we want to love,

many times no, love is a force, but sometimes yes, we can choose to love someone and deepen that love with time. Love is a very width statement, a romantic love is different from the love we have for our children, and most of what we call love is a conditioned love that changes depending on the situation and mindset. Unconditional love is rare. We all experience it for some moments in our life, but not many of us keep it strong through time and situations.

@solarsupermama

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I'm not sure if everyone is feeling it, but there are quite a few of us going through major transition right now. The world seems to be sort of a shit show at the moment in fact. I've seen a number of serious tragedies over the last month. A lot of death, a lot of separation, a lot of pain. What I'm saying is that there has been a lot of loss in my world lately. A lot. So much so that the separation between me and my husband is not the biggest thing going on.

So I want to take this question out a little bit and widen the scope from the traditional focus on romantic relationships. I guess this is also partly because I am so done with those. One time I asked my Nana if she ever considered remarrying after my grandfather died, and she said, “ooooh heaven’s no!” I never understood that until now. I'd rather chop off my own fingers than be in a relationship. Ok, that's a small exaggeration, but I have no interest in all that hassle. I'm over here loving on me, myself, and I at the moment.

@mountainjewel

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For the last @Tribesteemup Biweekly Question, What does it mean to be human?, I dug in a little bit about our experiences in Earth School, the fact that we're all here experiencing life in these bodies and within the context of relationships through space and time. Love is one of the most powerful of teachers, and through this, we are given opportunities to grow, to change & to be changed, seemingly by forces from without and of course within.

We commonly employ phrases like fall in love, head over heels in love, being taken with x, and other things that let us know that love is a deeply involved process that even can make us crazy sometimes. It's important to also add here that love as a long term thing can be a choice! We can choose to cultivate ardor or connection with someone(thing) through spending time with it or focusing on the positive attributes about it. But yet, the romantic or magnetic aspect that we refer to as love is often a "hit ya up side the head" kind of thing, at least in the beginning.

@trucklife-family

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I simply can not imagine a life without love.

It is something we have no control over, it is a force of nature, it is something that just is. It is not ours to command, it is not something that we should try and dissect and understand, it is something we just need to accept. Love is the one thing that can unite us, too many people today live in fear when they should be living from a place of love, can you imagine what that would be like. If we all were able to meet each other from a place of love.

As a children I had some crazy ideas of what love was, because I grew up in a violent home. My father was aggressive towards my mother and they fought all the time. In my eyes that was what adult love was. Both my father and mother were aggressive towards me, my father more so, yet everyone where I was told that my parents loved me, so love for me was aggressive and painful. I now know that it was not real love, but it did have a huge influence on how I viewed love between people. I viewed it as Aggressive, difficult and very painful. Luckily for me I relearnt what it really can be, through my friends, my partners and my children.

@likedeeler

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The thing which immediately struck me as being funny about this question is that it implies that we have a choice.
Frankly my dear, I believe we don´t.
Unless you´re on the psychopath that is.

Because love is the ingredience of life without which we cannot survive. First we need to be loved in order to survive. This job is usually done by the most important being in our life, our mother.
If all goes well, this love will be enough to shepherd us through the valley of darkness for the rest of our life, because I guess this love will be as perfect, pure and unconditional as we will ever find, nothing compares to it.
And since we learn by imitation we love our mother back, this is the law of nature.

So I guess this question refers more to the kind of love we call romantic love, but also there I think we have no choice.
Even when it comes to love, the German language is quite prosaic, to fall in love is a plain sich verlieben, but in English you fall in love, in Quebecois you tomber en amour, in French there is some coup de coeur, so these phrases describe the suddenness and choicelessness of the falling in love process much better than the German one, you lose the ground under your feet and you fall.

@riverflows

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"I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all."

Tennyson wrote these lines as he grieved over the loss of his friend who died suddenly in 1833. Life is 'sorrow touched with joy', he concedes, and indeed, this is the essence of this question - that love and loss walk hand in hand, and that without grief and loss and pain, love and joy is not as sweet.

It's the contract that we all have with life - that we may live and love, but we must also grow old and die, and those we love will die too, inevitably. I am currently teaching David Malouf's 'Ransom' to teenagers, who have yet to truly experience romantic love, yet many have already known loss and grief of parents, brothers and grandparents. It is hard to teach some scenes as one of the girls in the class just lost her brother to suicide. It breaks my heart, and I am conscious of her in particular as I talk through King Priam pleading to the warrior Achilles to give him the body of his son. He appeals to Achilles pity and compassion, reminding him that it behooves all men to treat each other with kindness because we all love, and we all feel loss, and we all will grow old and die - that is the price of being mortal:

@eco-alex

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There aren't many movies that REALLY stuck in my mind, but one of them was Moulin Rouge. It was a powerful and emotive movie about many things, but overall it was about love. The motto of this movie was one that I will always remember:

The Greatest Thing You'll Ever Learn is to Love, and be Loved In return

Who ever forgets their first love? Have you ever had that feeling where nothing else exists except another person? Who remembers those incredible moments when time stops and nothing else even matters? In that state of rapture we are lost in a sea of love, feeling for the first time what we really are. We chase this feeling, we can not resist it. When we have it we remember that there is nothing else that feels so good. We would die for Love! All the things that we have been doing to fill the void suddenly lose meaning. We are ready to let go of everything, for the one we love.. for the feeling of love ... even ourselves!

@zen-art

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The line in my title is better known as a statement and not as a question but since I am always pointing out how questions are more important than answers, I agree that it should be in this form. Some will answer the question with yes and some with no, it all depends on our personal experiences and our thought patterns. What do you think? If you knew in advance that you will end up hurting and suffering, would you love?

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Those lines come from the poem In Memoriam A.H.H. written by British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson in 1849. The last line is often used to discuss the endings of romantic relationships even though the poet wrote the piece in remembrance of the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Arthur died suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage in Vienna in 1833. Critics all around the world considered this poem to be one of the great poems of the 19th century. Keeping this in mind, I will move away from focusing entirely on romantic relationships and approach this from a general standpoint. Love is not only romantic, ask any parent that and they will agree. If you could ask Alfred, Lord Tennyson, he would agree too.

@hopehuggs

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Love, love is what makes the world go around, isn’t it?

Love, I have always struggled with love. I was convinced from a young age that my parents didn’t love me. They seemed more concerned with their respective new partners and making sure that worked, then what was going on with me. Nowadays, I’m sure they do love me, but they weren’t that verbal about from what I recall, either that, or I am just really awfully needy. They gave me everything they could, but it always felt something was missing, or I was in the way and I have felt that hole for most of my adult life. I met my ex-husband and I thought that was love at first sight. We met on a blind date and he was just the most awesome person I’d ever met. Then I met his dog, that sealed the deal! I count Taz amongst the bestest friends I have known as we comforted each other when times were at their worst. But, I don’t think I really experienced complete and utter love until my daughters were born and holding them in my arms. That was the strongest feeling of love I felt. Then I knew what love should feel like...

@thegreens

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This week, Ecotrain brings a question that has reminded on why i should continue to love unconditionally.
"I will continue to love my wife and kids, family and friends, and love every individual of this planet irrespective of their sex, age, race, religion, color, geographical background, etc; as well as love and care for Mother Earth. I will do this because it's the right thing to do and whenever i stumble and fall, i will gather strenght and hope and continue to show some love to people and the planet for Love is all that matters." Mr. Green 2018

Yes! I think it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all and think yes because it’s the pain of love that makes us to love more.

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