title: Reflections on love's spirals.
abstract: This article seeks to explore how the experience of love and its expression might inform and guide reflection and inquiry into love. Despite the importance of love in our personal and professional lives, it remains a topic that has further scope for inquiry within nursing circles. The article takes as its catalyst an encounter that emerged out of a piece of research that was exploring individuals' experiences of becoming healers and the journey they undertook. One participant spoke deeply and profoundly of his experience of love, which generated for me a personal, experiential, and intellectual process of inquiry. The article seeks to try and create a synthesis between rational inquiry and subjective experience. It explores W. B. Yeats's notion of a gyre, a spiral, as an image and metaphor for integrating different conceptions and understandings of love. It seeks to illustrate how a more integrated understanding of love may open up spaces of inquiry that are more flexible, creative, and spontaneous.
authors.affiliation: University of the West of England, Bristol, UK BS16 1DD. Gerard.Kenny@uwe.ac.uk
authors.forename: Gerard
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Kenny
mesh_terms: D000739:Anecdotes as Topic; D001294:Attitude to Health; D006694:Holistic Health; D018939:Holistic Nursing; D006801:Humans; D007389:Internal-External Control; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008149:Love; D011788:Quality of Life; D029181:Spirituality