Love I

What is love? It is an eternal question humanity is constantly seeking to answer. Try as we may, that single world remains slippery - easy to say, harder to define in different languages around the world; it's often a single word that contains multitudes.

In Arabic, there are fifty words for love. It was a fact that struck me deeply when I first learnt it. Love in Arabic is not confined to a single shape, it moves in many phrases and expressions, it has many forms and each carries its own name. In that expansion, I discovered how love found new ways to linger in the language I was learning, and how that language had grown to encompass the varied forms love can take. I came to realise that love cannot be contained. It is not a single thing, it lives among us, it is multifaceted, at times literally: love comes to us with many faces. It's a force that lives with and between many bodies and minds.