An Ode to Amor

February 14, 2022
Kate Joyner

Love – you mysterious beast. Where do you come from and how do you come?

There is no logic to your madness. Your force is much greater than the sum of my parts and yet you seem to dissect all of the places of my soul that have pushed you away.

Why do we refuse love when it calls? Is it because it’s too great a force?

Is it because when we say yes, we ultimately leave ourselves open for our own egoic demise? It seems to me love can be a beautiful flower or it can be a deadly train wreck.

Over years of diligent study of this otherworldly phenomenon I have learnt that in order to do service to love, one must forge a vessel that can allow the holy spirit of love to pour in.

Naive are the ones who believe that love can just happen. It needs to be forged, like a sword. The tip of that sword needs to be wielded with great responsibility for the fruits of love to reign in. Love came knocking at my door six weeks ago. I haven’t slept since. I’m asking myself, what is this, that which does not let me sleep?

All of the places I thought I had healed have resurfaced with vengeance. To stand in the face of my dear insecurity and to keep choosing to stay in the field of love, I think is one of the most crazy-making acts of all time.

But love is a beast and it’s wild. To think that we can wield such a force within the confines of our own humanness is a faux pas. We must call on the world of the gods if we are to succeed at such a reckoning.

The fine balance between our frail humanness and our undeniable divinity is the dance that shapes us here. We must forge ourselves simultaneously into a vessel and a sword.

Receptive to the flow of love’s embrace and at once prepared to kill for love’s gaze. Not many people know about the power of love. The need to kill. We are rendered defenceless in the intoxication, but there are trials and tests that love demands of us and we have to know that we’ve got what it takes to be worthy of the kiss of the gods.

The inevitable demons of love’s wounds will surface, wanting to derail the whole show before it’s even begun, because deep down in human frailty we believe that we are not worthy of such a fine elixir as this one.

The human dance between deserving and not deserving, between wanting and not believing keeps us away from the gods. Stuck in a perpetual hamster wheel of a self fulfilling prophecy, if we are not careful with our minds then we will create our own train wreck to deny ourselves the only thing that makes this existence worth living.

Imagine a life without love and perhaps that will spur you into the forging of your sword. We have to be prepared to kill our own defences, to strike down with gusto that which stands in the way.

A warrior of the heart, a lover of the fight: to embrace the ferocity is to embrace, not just the lovey dovey water’s flow but to burn with the fire of passion. Water and fire, this alchemy of love’s elements, which washed in on the great wings of air and grounded us into the earth, bringing spirit into flesh.

Love is a declaration, it’s a meeting of the worlds, a bridging between our animality and our divinity. Love needs our body and our heart. One without the other is a ship lost out at sea or a wrestle with a trash can in a back alley.

At the core of who we are is the existential longing to be wrapped in the arms of love’s embrace. This is the force that moves every decision we make, whether we are aware of it or not. Can we be good servants? Can we render ourselves defenceless and go about giving ourselves to the one undeniable truth at the core of us?

Knowing that we are not in control and shall never be allows us to be taken by the embrace of the ocean’s depth. To know love is to know wildness. We have to turn ourselves to the cardinal directions and let ourselves become one with the ways of the wild which are much bigger than us.

To hold love in our human minds alone is to do great disservice, we must turn towards the rising sun and the setting moon and ask that they hold within their embrace the promise of our existence.

We must risk making a fool of ourselves, of being too much because quite frankly love is too much. It’s a lot. It’s a big deal. It’s the great mystery that forged us, so when love comes knocking, don’t turn away. 

How do you know when love is a knocking?

Intense feelings of not being able to concentrate on anything, being taken in a dream, delirium, heightened senses, even out of one’s senses. Intoxication is likely one of the finest words one can muster. It’s a force that one would not choose, even though one wants it so badly. It’s the age old blessing within the curse. The light and the dark arise simultaneously.

So as I stand on the edge of love peering in, I can’t help but feel like I have no choice but to descend. If I were to refuse this flowering, then my heart would hurt as much as it would to freefall and yet if I walk away I will be less of a person. And somehow the call to be shaped by a force much greater than me renders me helpless to my own egoic preference of having everything in control.

As a student of this force, I have gathered my backpack of provisions only to know that they might get all taken in the wind or washed away by a flood. And yet this is the great invitation: to go out beyond your comfort and let everything happen to you. To risk the great unknown of the oceanic odyssey, as the only way of living. Because if we are to trade in that mystery for the comfort of the known, then perhaps we have forgotten why we have come.

To give oneself to love is to give oneself to life, to offer yourself up as a morsel in the grand design and to let the wildness of love take you beyond what you’ve ever known before.

It’s no small thing. It’s a very big thing and so you have to make yourself big. Big enough to let love find a palace within your heart, so that the depth of your soul can be known to this wild wild world. I know that when I die, I want to be able to say that I gave everything.

So here on this day and every day, I give my heart to the wildness of this world and I say ‘will you’, ‘take me’.

HAPPY LOVE DAY, LOVES.

MAY EVERYDAY BE AN ODE TO AMOR

 

 

 

 

 

 

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