Much thanks to the efforts of my dear readers. You all—mystics, philosophers, and hopeless romantics alike—have done your part in broadening the spectrum and enhancing the hues of this, life’s most treasured ideal. But now I must reveal my own purpose in the question.

I am descended from the great chieftains of old. The great stories of the tribe—winding back through blood and time to the elder days of my people when the world was new and the Breath rose like morning mist in the garden of our innocence—are the stories of one single sacred word. The most sacred word of all the words of men save the name of the Breath itself.

Love.

And now, I am called to walk the path of my forefathers, but unlike their world, I am a chieftain in a concrete wilderness where mountains of glass and steel rise like monoliths from asphalt plains. There are many men but few tribes here. Most are wanderers, scavengers, and vagrants. Here words grow like weeds—as plentiful, intrusive, and fleeting. Few tribes, fewer great stories, even fewer holy words. Hearts are small, minds are small, men are small. This is a disorienting place. No other place or time has needed the sacred word more. But how can I speak it if I do not understand what it means?

Herein was my dilemma. For thousands of years the weeds grew up and around the sacred word, encircling it, choking its life away. Now the word remains but its truth is forgotten. It is used every day in my world. Used and abused, and with every ignorant sputter, with every meaningless vow, with every uselessly lofty explanation its power is choked away all the more. And so one night I asked the Breath, no, I demanded, that the sacred word be restored to me. If I was to lead my people with it, if the true path was wrapped around it, if life and death itself were dependent upon it, then I demanded to understand it.

Only a sadistic god would require obedience to a command that cannot be understood. I will not bow to such breath. No, I sensed that the doing of love would be difficult enough without compounding the task with the futility of ignorance, following an unintelligible command.

Now, I am as much a mystic, a philosopher and a romantic as the rest of you. I am a chieftain, and a warrior poet, do not think that I have come to strip love of its mystery or to over-simplify it, but I am determined to believe that the mystery of love, the beauty of love, need not be in its undefinability but rather in its effect upon the world. Love is too important a word to not be easily understood and we are far too prone to fool ourselves into believing that we understand it. We must test ourselves. The truth is, if we cannot begin to explain it in but a few words to a child then we ourselves do not know.

So I lay before you a new challenge. Find another word, a synonym for love. One that so clearly and perfectly aligns itself with love’s true meaning that one definition illuminates the other. Is there a single word or idea that we could use to replace love in our stories without doing them disservice but in fact brings even greater meaning to them? I think there is.

I think I’ve found it.

Care to try?