Love is the Law

Some of this may sound like theory, but it was written from the body. It wasn’t learned through study so much as through inner experience. What this language names came through real encounters with harm, desire, and repair—not as vague concepts, but as they showed up concretely in my life once I slowed down enough to listen.

In that space of silent contemplation, away from outside and expectation, I heard volcano talking to me. From her, my capacity for love and belonging has taken infinite bloom.

Love is the Law

I used to think love was measured by how little damage it caused. If I was careful enough—gentle, patient, forgiving—then I was good, and being good meant I was loving. It was important for me to be good, and panic would overtake me anytime I was engaged in the solitude of my own badness. But beneath that panic lived a different sensation—small, warm, and unmistakably mine. A quiet pleasure in the very thing I feared, as if the self I kept trying to discipline had been waiting for me in the dark. 

What I called “badness” was less a moral failure than a place where my vitality gathered, the secret room where I felt unguarded, impulsive, and real. I didn’t yet have the language for it, but this was the beginning of my Great Work: discovering that the parts of myself I’d been taught to correct were the same parts that made me feel alive. The goodness I was being told to perform was choreography—smooth, repeatable, socially legible—while the so-called badness felt like truth, raw and luminous, the pulse of a self that refused to flatten itself in order to be liked. 

No matter how deeply I was able to feel that illicit pulse of myself in the dark—small, voracious, ungovernable—I still tried to smother it in the light of my desired relations. I didn’t know how to let that aliveness exist anywhere but in secret. Around others, I kept reaching for goodness, hoping it would earn me tenderness, stability, a place to rest. But the more I tried to protect that hidden self by performing virtue, the more I felt myself thinning, contracting, becoming spectral. The self that felt alive and feral in the shadows had no room to breathe in the performance of goodness, and so I kept turning against it, choosing disappearance over honesty, thinking that was the price of being loved.

There was a tension building that no amount of goodness could hold. The self I kept hidden in the dark and the self I performed in the light were now pressing against each other, each languishing over their own inexpressible solitude. And perhaps things would have stayed this way, with me distant and alienated from myself but tangled up within myself with terrible anxiety had I not done ritual after ritual asking G-d and all my spirits who might listen to grant me the gift of alchemy. 

Thus, I was awakened to myself as a response to the trauma of broken relationships. Forced to bear the weight of all my deepest relational fears—abandonment, betrayal, degradation—there came a point when I realized my quiet couldn’t be soft anymore. It was simply too heavy. Each time I forgave, each time I stayed quiet or turned the other cheek, I disappeared a little more. 

I began to sense, slowly, that what I had been calling love was really a discipline of disappearance. Each apology I offered became another layer I stripped off myself, a kind of moral offering meant to keep the peace while my own boundaries frayed beneath it. What I mistook for patience was really fear, and what I called forgiveness was often just a way to postpone the moment I would have to name what was happening. The quiet I kept wasn’t noble or gentle—it was the sound of me retreating from my own life. There came a point when I could feel the cost of that retreat in my body: a dull pressure behind the ribs, a tightening around the throat, a fatigue that felt like being slowly unthreaded. Before anything broke open outwardly, something inside me began to say, very quietly, no more.

I tried voicing insight, hoping moral virtue might teach others to treat me with tenderness, but even that only seemed to achieve further alienation while the relational other continued dehumanizing me without consequence. So I began to embrace my badness as a means towards an agent response to the harm being thrust upon me. At first this change scared me, how thirsty I was for blood.

As I tossed and turned with my rage, I learned that the animal inside me did not even think in terms of domination, but cared only about the raw, unfiltered responses of a body pushed beyond its capacity to hold greif. It was the kind of harm that erupts when two techtonic plates crash in the ground below—cascading lava like clarity, too elemental to be cruel.

I thought nothing of law or punishment, overwhelmed by the vibration of the now unignorable desire to make myself known. And to my surprise, this desire for contact was alive in that its function was to make what had been invisible visible—to show those who’d harmed me the wound that they were desperately pretending wasn’t there. My responses were violent, but they were also clear. What I felt in those moments wasn’t pride or guilt but the shock of seeing something torn open that had been covered for years. I realized how many of our days move like that—quietly split at the seams, pretending the tear isn’t there.

The World Revealed in the Wound

After that, the words I’d relied on to guide myself—kindness, forgiveness, self-restraint—began to feel too narrow to hold the body I was living in. I could finally see that these so-called virtues hadn’t protected me; they had trained me to stay still while I was being harmed. I kept trying to name the ways I was cut open and wounded. But every attempt to speak was met with anger, as if my goodness should be measured by how gracefully I endured other people’s attacks. I was told that to be loved I had to remain calm, composed, forgiving, even as I was being maimed. 

Kindness became the command to swallow my pain. Forgiveness without conversation or repair became a requirement to let the harm continue. And the restraint others demanded of me wasn’t my virtue at all—it was their expectation that I sacrifice myself quietly, like a lamb meant to bleed without protest. The distance this created between myself and my own aliveness was the deepest wound of all.

What I had been calling “being good” was really the performance of disappearing on command. I looked around and saw that the world surrounding me rewarded that disappearance—praised me for being understanding, patient, selfless—while each act of compliance to gain one of these social rewards hollowed me out a little more. In this world built on capitalist production and western hegemonic morals, goodness was not measured by what gave me life or brought me into relation but by how completely I could erase myself to preserve someone else’s comfort. This disgusted me. 

Listening as Ethic

This volcanic eruption opened something up in me. Regardless of the consequences that would come from the outside, inside I was no longer distanced from myself. I was filled with too much sound, my own multiplicity now enmeshed and brought into the open by my own exploding noise.

So I chose to be honest, and I stopped to listen. When I did, I began to hear something sight alone had never let myself acknowledge: the world was not as it appeared. My eyes fix objects as a set of separate, manageable shapes, but when I oriented towards my ears, the outside world appears as a field of vibrations and crossings. Sound doesn’t respect boundaries; it moves through whatever tries to contain it. And the more I listened, the more I could feel how everything in this world touches everything else.

Listening therefore seemed to open me towards an acknowledgment that the world porous. It showed me that nothing lives in isolation: histories touch, wounds echo through the bodies of others, and even small gestures revealed themselves as waves which ripple outward into events I cannot see. 

The more I listened, the harder it became to believe in purity at all. Purity requires separateness, transcendence, a life sealed off from what surrounds it. But listening revealed the opposite: an interwoven world where every life depends on another, where every movement creates consequence. In such a world, rupture becomes part of the fabric of time through interrelation.

It was in this contemplation that I learned to be alive was to be full of contradiction—growth tangled with decay, beauty threaded with danger, sweetness resting on the same ground as rot. Nothing in nature stays pure. Even a garden only looks clean because its dirt, insects, and decomposition have been hidden from view.

Once I noticed this, the idea that love should be harmless began to fall apart. If no living system survives without tension, how could love? I had been imagining love as something gentle because I had been told to think of the world incorrectly—sanitized, quiet, trimmed into shapes that would never threaten me. 

I thought to myself—if the world is whole, if God, or whatever holds everything together, is a single continuous movement—then love cannot be the exception. It has to participate in that same movement. The symphony which holds us all together must express both the ache inside pleasure and the awe inside pain. There is no such thing as the ideal experience of safety because reality reveals itself as unruly and full of forces that cut as they heal, but this knowledge roots in only when we really stop and give it our attention.

From this, a different understanding of love emerged: Love became the practice of remaining present to complexity—of letting myself be touched by the full spectrum of relation without demanding purity or protection. To love, I realized, was to attune to the whole, not to carve away the parts that unsettled me.

The Body Attuned Toward Aliveness

Without the old scaffolding, I began to watch what my choices left behind—their aftertaste in the body, the way they shaped time around me. Some left me hollow; others, even the painful ones, felt alive and exact, like stepping closer to the center of my own inner truth.

Over time I started to recognize that feeling as a kind of internal compass. It wasn’t pleasure exactly, or ease, but a subtle quickening, a warmth that gathered when I moved in the direction of what was alive in me. The body seemed to know before thought did. It leaned toward what was true in the same way a plant turns toward light. To be nourished by Love, I realized, is a feeling of alignment that unfolds when I move toward what I genuinely desire. That was how I began to find direction again.

Though, that kind of discernment only works if I’m honest about desire itself. For a long time I mistook desire for lack—an ache aimed at what I didn’t have, something to chase, to capture, to keep. But that was only the shadow of it. 

In this breaking open, it occurred to me that desire doesn’t have to be reaching toward absence in order to be real; it can be found in the sensation of being met by life as I move through it, the quick pulse that reminds me I’m still here. This doesn’t protect me from loss—but it does allow me to be in relation to discomfort, pain, and grief. 

This is because once I began to hear desire vibrationally, I could feel the world touch me back through both resonance and friction.  A string only sings when it’s held under tension and then touched with pressure; without both, there’s no sound at all.

Love, I think, begins there: in the willingness to stay porous to what moves me, even when it hurts, because that mutual movement is what aliveness is. In that way, I am never alone. I am always wrapped in the fire of song.

Pain as Information

From here, pain no longer felt like a sign that I had failed. It arrived more like guidance—an internal pressure that showed me when I was moving out of alignment with myself. I started forming my language around what I noticed the ache changed depending on how I approached desire. 

When I treated desire as lack, pain tightened. My body braced, as if I needed to close some imagined gap, and that tightening pushed me toward control—managing myself, managing others, trying to contain whatever frightened me. In that posture, pain stopped communicating. It went rigid and heavy, turning into something stubborn and closed.

But when I allowed my experience of desire to be shaped by what was alive in me, pain began to help me listen. It was able to communicate with me when my actions were out of rhythm with what truly felt vital and nourishing in life, guiding me back toward right relation with the enabled web of all manifest Being.

Here, I realized that transformative love doesn’t abandon its nature when things become violent. Its value isn’t based in gentleness or softness or passivity. Rather, it comes from the steadiness that enters us from staying in relation, from continuing to listen even when what it hears is painful. Love in these rewilded terms remains attentive through rupture; it refuses to shut down or turn away.

Because of that, love can’t be measured by purity or by how cleanly it behaves. This is nonsensical as purity depends on staying untouched. Love instead weaves us together by cocophonous contact. Its worth shows itself in the honesty of its movement—whether it responds truthfully to what is happening, whether it stays attuned instead of collapsing into avoidance, performance, or control. In this way, love is less about being unblemished and more about remaining open enough to hear what reality is actually saying even if that tonation is rapturous and demands stillness in uncomfortable spaces.

Listening through pain taught me to stay with every sensation I used to turn away from. Dissatisfaction, for example, began as a faint vibration under the skin—a small, steady tremor that let me know something in me had slipped out of tune. Instead of trying to escape it, I started letting that feeling register. It showed me when I was beginning to close myself off, when my inner warmth had started to retreat or close. That quiet thrum became my reminder to return—to breathe back toward myself and feel for the rhythm I had dropped. It was the way my body called me home.

This marked dissatisfaction as a necessary companion in my new embodied ethics—not a flaw to correct, but the very pulse that keeps me widening. Its discomfort became a kind of opening mechanism, pushing my edges outward so I could feel more of the world and let more of the world move through me.The dripping ache of desire thus rewilds itself as the pressure of something larger pressing up against me, trying to enter my interior, urging me past the old perimeters I had set around love, others, and myself. 

Every time I listened to that restlessness, I felt dissatisfaction as an erotic sensation. It could cause me to get wet, stretch myself a little further, as if my body were turning toward a greater brightness, longing to be filled with the totality of sensation available within the material kingdom of God. As long as I can feel that subtle pulse inside me, I know I am still listening—I am still expanding toward the body of God, learning to recognize more and more of its light as it enters mine.

Love Rewild

Love, as I know it now, doesn’t begin in an idea, because it contains no ideals. Instead, I find it beginning in the moment the world touches me and I feel the ground I stand on shift—the small quickening in my breath, the warmth rising in my chest, that blessed sensation that can only come when something in me has been rearranged.

In those moments I watch myself soften to whatever is happening. I stop sorting experience into holy or unholy, beautiful or ugly. Rather, I try to move with the rhythm I feel beneath everything—the hymn that runs equally through trees, traffic, sweat, laughter, grief. To be in union with my own song in celebration with the earth becomes deeply nourishing to me.

What makes this stance blessed to me isn’t that it avoids pain, but that it refuses any love that requires me or anyone else to shrink or remain small. And because this can read as unruly, feral even, following what’s alive doesn’t always look like social belonging. If people expect performance—politeness, silence, obidience—then staying oriented towards what is alive in you requires a willingness to stand at the edge of the room, unsure, quiet, listening. 

Ironically, this very edge allows for love to push beyond the limits of its contained power. Only here, outside the demand to please, can I feel the living pulse of relation—the way a difficult truth lands, the way my body leans toward or away from someone, the way life keeps trying to move between us. Despite what I was told to believe, alienation only comes from dimming myself or performing a self I think is necessary to belong–as if I was only allowed to be in relation when I covered myself, scarf-dancing, half-known and unseen. 

This is why I am grateful I closed my eyes to listen. I can tell when a relationship is participating in life because there is warmth, curiosity, breath. I can also tell when the current has gone still—when conversation turns rehearsed, when my body tightens, when I begin to disappear. Listening doesn’t spare me from difficulty, but it keeps me in contact with what’s real, rather than with the roles I used to perform by reminding me we are all connected in these waves of sound.

Because the web of relation is always shifting, staying inside it means I have to shift too. A bond that once felt alive may now need slower pacing, clearer boundaries, or more distance. My body registers these changes before language does—an opening, a heaviness, a change in breath. Transformation, then, is not spectacle. It’s the ordinary work of adjusting to what life is asking of me in this ever tumbling now.

Love has become rewild to me—not as the promise to cause no harm, or the performance of goodness, or the softening that turns me into smoke. Instead, love has told me they are the act of staying in honest contact with the world—without abandoning myself or requiring others to abandon themselves to keep me comfortable. When I live this way, I notice that life grows. Rooms feel larger. Conversations breathe. Even endings feel like part of the same generosity—just life redirecting its current to help grow my kingdom under a shady orchard of desire as its canopy of trees.

If this aligns with God, it’s not because it is pure or obedient, but because it keeps participating in the ongoing creation of things. Love becomes the way we stay inside that creation—awake, responsive, and still willing to meet one another at the gate, softly signing;

Come swimming with me.