Love as a practice

While many people here in the US exchanged flowers, chocolates, diamond rings, or small valentine cards yesterday - I kept thinking about "love as a practice".



So I looked for the definition of Love, and here are a couple that I found:

From Merriam-Webster dictionary:
love \ˈləv\ noun

(1): strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties
(2): attraction based on sexual desire : affection and tenderness felt by lovers
(3): affection based on admiration, benevolence, or common interests.

From Wikipedia:
Love is any of a number of emotions and experiences related to a sense of strong affection and attachment. The word love can refer to a variety of different feelings, states, and attitudes, ranging from generic pleasure to intense interpersonal attraction. Love is not a single feeling but an emotion built from two or more feelings. Anything vital to us creates more than one feeling, and we also have feelings about our feelings (and thoughts about our feelings). This diversity of uses and meanings, combined with the complexity of the feelings involved, makes love unusually difficult to consistently define, even compared to other emotional states.

I would like to consider love as a practice; something we act upon, rather than just feel. A practice in which we observe ourselves in our loving state of being, choosing deeds as means to manifest our love. Random acts of kindness, picking trash in the park, sharing a smile with others, watching after our own well being, and always showing affection to our loved ones - are all manifestations.

Many consider "being in love" as powerful. I believe that "being love" has far greater affects on self and community. Start the ripple...