Love knows no borders

As I travel and analyze the various people that I meet, the one thing that sticks out to me that is always, always characteristically the same… is our unfaltering obsession with love. Yes, that word that can make us either smile or cry depending on life’s moments we are in. The love I am speaking of here is the kind of love that we all inevitably, in some point of our lives, become obsessed with. Finding that person that makes your heart skip a beat and your mind race with thoughts of building a life together, or at least a few months or years. This simple act can become daunting and heartbreaking, but as with anything that can ultimately lead to a broken heart, the journey you took to get there is usually lined with euphoric joy and uncharted waters being explored…




So this simple act of finding love, to some, can become life’s biggest challenge and goal. Travelling this world I have seen that love in other lands is not always as easy as looking and finding. In some areas of the world the finding and discovery, the courting and quickened heart beats, is a luxury that many don’t get to explore. While their heart may ache for another, fate will make it so they are forced to turn their eyes away from the one person that they feel completes them.



To love by choice is a luxury that they will never know.

Their paths are laid out for them, their choices taken away, and they will do what they are told for the sake of the family. Love to them may turn into something different… giving love a meaning of its own. Love to them may not mean that you are able to spend your life with the person that was the first to make your heart ache for their arms, or the person that won your heart after a fight for your hand. But perhaps love may mean finding it in the security of the other that was appointed to you. Conceivably finding love in another through time instead of through heart and through growth instead of through courtship. This makes love take on a whole new meaning. Love is even more complicated than what we already knew to be true.

In most parts of America fortunately that is a feeling we are not faced with. We are free to love and free to choose who we love. Free to pick our mate for reasons merely of the heart and not due to social class, religion, nationality, or your family that you are born into. As I know that this is a luxury and a blessing, I also can remember distinctive times that this has felt like a curse. When you find love and then lose it, known happiness with another and then witnessed it fade before your eyes. In those times the thought of not having to bear the weight of choosing your person can seem appealing. When your heart is broken, when you cannot have the person that you feel is your soul mate, in those times it seems fitting that you just be placed with someone… for what does it matter if you can’t have the one your heart is aching for.



But knowing that we are the same everywhere reminds me that love is a blessing and not a curse. As I walked the roads in SE Asia, I witnessed love all around. I witnessed young girls giggling over boys, couples walking hand in hand on dirt lined roads. Whether we are born into poverty or into lavishness, our hearts all beat the same. We were given the ability to love another in all different forms. So we will. We will continue to love and dream. Let our minds wander to what is or what could be. Hope that what we have will last forever, perpetually bringing us back to what it is that brought us there to begin with. I read these words on a sign in Bali… They spoke to me then and remind me yet again today of the power of love.



“Love~ I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times, in life after life, in age after age, forever .

(All pictures by my love.. Mr Curt Joyce)