Treatise on Love - Nicole Daedone

We are constructed of this that we call Love. It is not outside of us, it is not kept from us, it is not hidden or concealed in any form. We must remember that the locus is here, always within us, emanating outward.

Now, to become this Love, to actualize this blueprint, to stretch this Love that is our essence to its furthest reaches, and to grow not only in one direction but in equal, simultaneous and balanced fullness, we must be courageous. For the work of Love is no small work. It is the task of the acorn - which is actually a blueprint for an entire ecology; an oak tree where birds rest and leaves fall and beneath the leaves bugs chomp and make soil and shade allows other plant life to grow – it is a breaking out of known reality in order to become clear, bright, awakened Source. This is the work of Love.

Just like the acorn, we have a hard shell that we must break through in order to realize Love, to become a greater and greater ecology of Love, an interdependent system of Love. This shell is our conditioned patterns. The difficulty is that the shell, for most of us, makes us feel safe. It is the world of ideas, values and beliefs that protect us and keeps our reality small, secure and recognizable. We fear admitting that we are Love, for to glimpse this Love once would forever shatter our ideas. It would put us in danger of beginning a chain of actualization, into the out-of-control sensation of cracking the shell.

But to not recognize that we are Love means that we must live in a perpetual state of delusion. We are afraid of opening our hearts to experience Love itself, so instead, we attempt to make the emanations, the forms of Love, into Love itself. We are like ducklings that follow around the first thing we see when the experience of Love rises up within us. We attach to the representatives of Love and forget its true source – the seed within us.

And at the same time, there is a lack of reverence for the forms Love takes. If we could understand that Love is like breath, it is how our soul takes life in and lets it go, then we would understand that our lives are saved in each moment that we experience Love. And in this, we would care of the forms our experience takes. In agreeing to use each others’ bodies as vessels through which to experience Love, it would become our duty and obligation, not to each other, but to Love itself, to remain open to offer one another the deepest reverence: “I am yours for life”.

But this is where we get confused, this is where we lose sight. Because “yours” in the sense of Love is much different than “yours” in the sense of conditioning. “Yours”, in terms of conditioning, means that we agree to keep ourselves as small as possible, consistently within the boundaries of another’s expectations. Wide open spaces threaten this kind of love, because eventually what arises is something out of alignment with expectation and in that, Love itself is endangered.

“Yours” in Love means always available to be used as a conduit in the raw, potent, true form of Love. To be willing to live in a perpetual state of expanding one’s capacity to allow Love to come through. It is saying, “I agree to be the place for you to call home”. We agree to be that the scent of warm food that draws another in, to feed them well when they enter, and when they wish to exit, to joyously wrap their scarf around their neck. We agree to never lock our doors, neither keeping one in, nor keeping one out, even if they lock their own.

Of course, conditioning is often mistaken for Love. In fact, conditioning is often all we know of Love because we are unwilling to take responsibility for Love. If we place ourselves in the prison of conditioned love, another is responsible for our care and feeding. In prison, we do not need to feel the ache of desire, the yearning to be filled, we do not need to go on the great adventure of touching nature, of picking berries and of tasting different plants; we do not need to risk danger. Instead, we settle for the distant remnants of Love, all to avoid being self generating, all for the illusion of guarantee.

How we lie in the name of love. We lie that we can hold ourselves in the mold of another’s projections. We lie that our love for another is not contingent on their remaining very still in the small box we have constructed for them. Over time, we construct the illusion that we hold back in order to please another; and when we find ourselves drowning in this pleasing, we blame the other. We blame the other for our having pretended to be something we are not. Because we were not willing to be true to the edicts of Love, to be honest, to locate the permanent source of Love within ourselves, we blame.

At the same time, we threaten to stop holding another when they speak a truth we find difficult, a truth that detonate a charge that we have not done the work to disarm ourselves. We withdraw our drawbridge, the access to our Love, if another speaks the truth. We train those around is to lie, to play out a theatre for our egos, and then we get upset when reality breaks through the third wall.

I’ve sat with this. I’ve thought long and hard about this. And I see that underneath all of this fear and contraction, lies the deep seated belief that at our core there is something wrong with us and we deserve no better. Love has no opponent other than this thought, this scarcity and wrongness, that leads us to reach outside of ourselves, away from the true source of Love.

So in Love we vow always to be ourselves, even at the risk of displeasing or losing another. This is how we honor Love. We honor it by paying our bills in present time and not letting them pile up and later filing bankruptcy. No, we pay those fears of abandonment off now, in cash, by telling and receiving the truth. This is where we start to become generative in our lives, to face the fears that have absorbed our life force. To take each of these fractured thoughts of inadequacy that we are flailing against and sit with them. Because really they just want attention, real attention. And with attention, they relax enough to reveal the true source of Love – within. To be Love then would be to be the embodiment of this message: You, just as you are, are perfect.

Were we to make a vow to another person that is congruent with true Love, it would be: I vow to live in the mystery with you, to be out of control, to use my entire being to draw out the same in you, to be a healing force. I will trust, so that the perfect mystery from within you can arise. When I stand in the face of something I don’t understand, I will draw out more through approval. I will rest with you, grateful for the opportunity to have seen you. And I vow to do this for life, whether or not I like what I see.”

Yes, for life. Though, for life though doesn’t mean in the same form always. As I said, do not confuse Love with form, the two are not the same. Romantic love is a form of Love. We get attached to Love when it wears this particular outfit and don’t recognize it when it changes clothes. As we search for a form of Love again and again, we do not hear it saying “Hello, I’m still here. I’m just relaxing, catching my breath, resting in friendship. I am still Love.”

Because this is what we seek - not the trappings of love, not the results of love, but Love itself. And this is only available now, naked, in unrestrained intercourse with the moment. We do not fall in, be in, yearn for, or think about Love. We become it.

This is our birthright and this is our destiny.