The concept of love can feel abstract in this age… So we’re offering up a gift: hand-crafted postcards, each with a quote for one of the #FourKindsOfLove! Philia, eros, agape, and metta: friendship, romance, compassion, and lovingkindness. We’re celebrating the fullness of love — a way of being, as Krista Tippett writes in Becoming Wise, rather than just a feeling:
“It is the elemental experience we all desire and seek, most of our days, to give and receive.
I long to make this word echo differently in hearts and ears — not less complicated, but differently so. The sliver of love’s potential which the Greeks separated out as eros is where we load so much of our desire, center so much of our imagination about delight and despair, define so much of our sense of completion. There is the love the Greeks called philia — the love of friendship. There is the love they called agape — love as embodied compassion, expressions of kindness that might be given to a neighbor or stranger. The metta of the root Buddhist Pali tongue, ‘lovingkindness,’ carries the nuance of benevolent, active interest in others known and unknown, and its cultivation begins with compassion towards oneself.
In both Hebrew and Arabic, the word for ‘compassion’ is related to the word for ‘womb.’ That’s beautiful and challenging in equal measure. Consider its implicit complexity in light of the bloody, miraculous real-world experience of birth, and it tells a frank story of love in its fullness. A merger of pleasure and risk and sacrifice. A dance of alternating vulnerabilities. A wellspring of joy. A challenge to endless learning by mistake. The moment-to-moment evolution of care.”
Perhaps there’s an old friend you’ve fallen out of touch with, or a long-distance partner to whom you’d like to extend a touch of warmth? At onbeing.org/fourkindsoflove, leave us a brief note about someone in your life with whom you share this expansive love. We’ll select the perfect postcard for you, and we’ll send it to them from a “secret sender” — a surprise memento of the love that lives between you, whatever shape it takes!
