worship love

It's a miracle to love. Love brings strength where it seems there should be none. One feels that one is moved, like the tide, but in ways that are not without reason. Love is a teacher. But how do we find this teacher?
I've noticed in reading younger people's blogs how powerfully some youth longs for love. I would guess that it is such people who find love in the end, because love does require of us that we want it. Otherwise, we would never believe it when we found it. And even after finding it, we can still doubt it, which says a lot about the faulty nature of humankind. We can put ourselves through unnecessary and trying tests to prove to ourselves that love exists, that love exists for us.
Tests, in part, exist as an answer to doubt: if it weren't for doubt, there would not need to be tests, because when we are sure of ourselves, even if we take a test, it doesn't feel like a test, but a matter of course. The fact that love continues to exist despite such petty tests is testimony to the fact that love is bigger than us, and that, in some peculiar way, as much as we choose love, love also chooses us.
So how does one get chosen? When I was thinking about this earlier this evening, for some reason, I thought of ancient Greek epics, and the notion of adventure - with all its risks, and ordeals - with their test of character and endurance, their trials. In some languages, the word temptation is the same as ordeal. The whole point being that one's character is being tested, and one mustn't submit wholeheartedly to one's weaknesses (I put it that way, because, inevitably, one will fail in some aspect). Through the test, one learns about oneself: like the difference between who one thinks one loves, and later, who one loves, or like how to train one's eye for that love, even when other people form some kind of anti-χορός, singing that the love isn't there. If one doesn't want love, truly, then this is where I imagine one loses it.

Love requires people of character: people of courage, who are not afraid to speak up in the name of love when the rabble are all seeing the same visions of greed or selfishness; people of humility, who can admit the difference between the desire that is formed on the basis of appearance, and desire for essence... Once upon a time, some of these handy skills were taught in schools: how to remain calm in what looks like chaos; how to wait before responding; how to respect authority and elders; how to be diligent and studious. Reaching love takes diligence; it takes respect of those around us so as not to blind ourselves, through anger, to the tiny opportunities in front of is; it takes patience and not believing what appears to be, but waiting for it to show its real face.
Reaching love and remaining in it is an ordeal. I believe that it continues to remain - even if society attempts to strip one of it, through the strain of jobs, social pressure,or economic woes. I believe it remains because once one has experienced it, one is an initiate and will always seek it.
Here is a much more concrete poem with advice on love, which, incidentally, reminded me rather of Omar Khayyam's The Rubaiyat, verses 19 and 20. It is a verse from Euripedes, via Laudator Temporis Acti:

Come now, come hither and be wise in time.
Knowest thou the burden of the life of man?
How should'st thou know it? Therefore learn of me
We must all die: Death's debtors are we all:
The day and hour knows no man, but he dies
The fool of never-coming morrows. Dark
Are all the processes of doom: it comes
Neither with observation nor by art
Forecast to any. Therefore, wise in time,
Drink and be merry. Count to-day as thine,
And all things else permit to the world's whim.
Be thy religion Woman: sweet is Love:
There is no kinder goddess: worship Love.
And let the world go by.
                                       If this be wisdom,
If this be wisdom, and methinks it is,
Obey it and be done with sorrow, drink
Crowning thy hair with flowers, and conquer Fate.
Full soon the pulse o' the wine within the cup
Shall smooth a sullen care-contracted brow.
Men are we, and a man asks Life: and Life
Dwells not with sour and solemn looks: with them
Dwells death, not life. So have I learnt the world.

 Elements: Animus.