What We Call Love Is Hate

A lot of what we call love is hate.

We search for something outside of ourselves, something to fill the void, to heal the wound, to make us whole. But in that search we project. We demand. We limit.

What we call love is really a prison.

It is the narrowing of the vast, open space of existence into something small, something manageable. We take the pure joy of being, the liberation that is our birthright, and we confine it within the walls of our expectations. We lock ourselves in a room with another and call it love.

Love—true love—is liberation.

It is the release of the other, the freeing of the self.

Love is not the grasping, the holding, the clinging. Love is the letting go, pushing ourselves and the other out. Love is making space for the other to expand, to grow, to become.

Love is not the comfort of possession.

Love is not the solace of being someone’s “special” person.

It is not the intoxication of being the object of another’s desire.

Love is the force that refuses to grasp, that refuses to contract, that refuses to pin the butterfly to the wall.

To love is to meet the person unknown each day, to see them anew.

It is to create a container that can hold the dynamism of magnets, the constant movement, the ever-changing flow. To be in love not as a state of possession, but as a state of being.