How many themes can you identify in your novels? I asked myself that question, and decided to start a series of posts, each one about a primary or secondary theme that I have identified as predominant in my novels. I will start with a primary theme – Love.

Throughout all my novels, Love seems to permeate the lines, whether it is romantic love, parental love, love of God, love of a friend … however, it seems to be linked to duty, almost in a duty vs. love or love vs. duty way. To complicate things more, Destiny is mixed in between those two. Now, why is that? I am not going to analyze my author’s psyche in this post; however, I will write about Love.

The topic of Love puzzles me. Why do we love? How far will we go for love? What would I do or not do out of love? What changes the love I feel for someone into something else, or is it that love leaves the heart and another feeling takes its place? Is love circumstantial or unchangeable? Why everything seems to hover or spin around love? Why loving seems so easy or so hard at times? What is the ultimate definition of love, and according to what or whom? – and so many other questions that make Love something to ponder seriously. I even started a one year study about Love in 2009, but got distracted, and restarted it on 2013 and got distracted again, and I hope that I get to finish it sometime.

The more I ponder, the more I realize how powerful this feeling is, and how it is capable of altering reality. It is also complicated, maybe because humanity makes it so. Take as an example the mother or father who gives her/his life to save a drowning son or even the stranger that does the same. Heroic acts of love. But also, take as an example the woman who murders her ex-lover claiming that she did it out of love, because love hurt so much – a crime of passion. One can argue that true love does not hurt another being, but in the mind of that woman, does she know the difference between the love she felt for her man when they were together and the love she still feels now that they are apart? How does the mind process this Love, or is it processing the pain of loving? Is love a feeling or a chemical/nerve reaction in the brain? We say we feel love in our hearts, but are we able to isolate the area in the brain? Certainly food for thought.

And I could probably write thousands of words about this topic, and never fully understand the true power of Love, and that is not even adding the spiritual side of Love to this post – God’s love. For now, I am happy to let you ponder about it. Feel free to comment.