May 1st has been designated as a Global Day of Love. It is meant to remind us about the power of unconditional love and what we can create when we attune to it. We often talk about love, especially unconditional, but what do we really mean by it?

Because love is not something we can actually see, people have different ideas about it. Some talk about love as being an action; others refer to it as a powerful feeling. Some people talk about love being omnipresent, while others insist that it is absent from the world. Some point out that there is an unlimited supply of it, and it is available to all; others believe that true love is hard to find and should be fought for. Ultimately, all of us seek love, and most of us cannot clearly define it or point to it.

According to the esoteric knowledge, Love is the very fabric of all that is. It is the energy of creation – pure, unlimited, unconditional, all-encompassing, and is, in fact, the very essence of what we refer to as God (though religions have given it a very human image and equipped it with very human views and very human conditions). So when the Bible says that we are created in the image of God, what it means to say is that we are created in the image of Love that created us, and what that further means is that a piece of that Love lives within each and every one of us.

That “piece” of Love that we carry within us is like a drop of water from one great ocean. When the ocean flows as one, it is impossible to tell where one drop ends and another begins. It is beautiful, and it is powerful. So how can we tune into this power now and what does it mean for us in practical terms as we go through this period of upheaval, uncertainty, and transition?

If love is the energy of all there is, then it can have many different expressions. It can be experienced through a sense of oneness – recognizing that ultimately we are all part of one great “ocean” and what happens to some of us affects all of us. It can be felt through compassion – understanding and empathizing with each other’s difficulties. It can be expressed in patience – holding space for each other to experience life as each person sees it. It can be lived through caring – doing things that are important to others even if they are not so important to us. It can be found in wisdom – realizing that we are all at different levels of awareness, and the innate immunity or spiritual strength that some may have developed on the path to enlightenment may not yet be accessible by others.

On this Day of Love, during this moment of reset we have a powerful opportunity to recognize that the Greatest Love of all resides right there within us and then to choose how to express it. If we allow our personal Love to shine, we may begin to see it in others as well, and we may discover that the light that shines through is powerful enough to illuminate the entire ocean.