Love

is a form of unilateral disarmament

Photo: © David Whyte

Love is merciless because in its raw elemental form, it is non-negotiable, it does not ask for reciprocation or for our affections to be requited, love just wants to take the path to a deeper and greater love and will burn away in its fire any who will not follow its uncompromising way. Love, we are afraid to discover, just wants us to love

LOVE

is an impossible word, we should never try to write about. Love is an essence we keep as a close secret, even from our selves. Love is the unrecognised invitation in every relationship, romantic, collegiate and even the central spark that ignites a deadly fight between sworn enemies. Love is the destination for which we are unconsciously packed and ready to go, but love is the place that is always disguised as somewhere else. Love takes us deeper while subverting what we imagined deeper meant. Love beckons to begin with and then always frightens, love seems to push us away, but the step toward love or the step away from love is always the choice we make when we feel we are making no choice at all. 

Love is a form of unilateral disarmament: an instinctual willingness for vulnerability that overwhelms our surface defences and at the same time, rids us in a frightening way, of the need for defences at all: love is frightening, exactly because it overwhelms and disarms us, takes us apart and strangely, simplifies us into something more real, more grounded more generous, and something simply un-recognisable, even as we are overwhelmed. 

Love is what we feel deeply but can never name in our sudden radical simplification, love’s job is simply to rename us, and then in turn, to rename and redefine every part of our lives, eliminating or downsizing all previous priorities, turning our world and our selves, inside out, and our outside, in. Love is contagious and always leads to other forms of love. Love takes us across the planet by plane and across boundaries we never even conceived we wanted to see or explore, bringing us to ground in strange cultures; asking us to fall in love with the unfamiliar as much as we fell in love with the person who brought us there. Love is an origin and an arrival all at the same time, giving the journey between origin and arrival, a new, surprise and burgeoning meaning, beyond our ability to name or understand.