I woke up early with a headache and rolled myself out of bed to push it away with ibuprofen and cake. (Not a medical professional here.)
Maybe to distract or maybe because it was the right time of morning, but I found myself opening the file to the path plan for “Daring to Fall in Love with Ourselves: By Curved Mirror and Open Shell.” In a few hours, it would be day two of path and we would call in Aphrodite in a few hours (as if She ever leaves…).
I know Love is tricky. I understand it is weighed down by story and expectation, and sometimes it is bolstered and buffered by delusion and delight.
I understand that Love is not what we think it will look like or feel like.
I understand it comes along as a heavy blanket, one that can soothe in the release of pressure.
And I understand that the cultural expectations to worship at the altar of Love are their own weight, their own suffocation when things are not aligned and ‘how they should be/feel/look.’
What is Found in the Looking and Longing
In this early morning please-let-these-meds-work, I returned to old teaching notes and lists of kinds of love. My list says seven, others say more. Some say fewer. Here are the ten that ended up in my notes today.
Eros - physical, romantic, sexual desire, passion, lust, romance
Philautia - self-love, self-esteem, pride, positive body image
Eroto-ropia - courtship, flirting, playful, noncommittal, seduction, casual sex
Agape - unconditional love, sacrificial, selfless love for humanity
Storge - family love, love for relatives
Mania - obsessive love, extreme jealousy, stalking
Pragma - practical love, duty, obligation, logic, arranged
Xenia - hospitality, guest-friendship, ritualized friendship
Philia - affectionate, friendship, affinity for another
Ludus - playful love, carefree
And I realize this is not helpful at all if your love doesn’t fit into these categories. Or if your love doesn’t have words. If it only has feelings and fumblings. If your love hurts in these definitions. In these confessions and calamities.
I understand that all of this spaciousness can be a vacuum or a liberation. That wide open places can help you stretch out your arms and still hold onto nothing.
But what I can offer is the idea that love is bigger than the narrow space you might have had to fit into. Love is magickal because it refuses to be confined, and desires to be held anyway.
Creating Your Own Love Spell
In this day of class, we will work with creating our own love spells, not to attract what is away from us, but to anchor into what love already is - and what it has always been.
Here, there, present. Really. It’s here.
I think of a part of the Charge of the Goddess: “If that which you seek you find not within yourself, you will never find it without. For behold, I have been with you from the beginning, and I am that which is attained at the end of desire.”
Here. Now.
Love draws us forward, maybe in contemplation. Maybe in creation. Maybe in disgust. Maybe in anger or rage. Maybe in a quiet prayer to forgive. Maybe in a stretch of muscle that remembers how to fold itself under their shoulder.
Maybe love draws us forward to inspire. And that inspiration comes in many forms and colors and flavors and feelings.
Maybe there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground (thanks Rumi), but there might also be a million ways to know love.
And that recognition begins with looking Love in the eye and asking:
“What do you bring?”
“What do you carry?”
“What do you know?”
Love has walked down all of the hallways. Love has put its ear up to the door to see what it can know. Love has traveled the length of stretching night shadows. Love has been in corners and eaves and the scattering of light through a prism at a certain time of day.
The Love that seeks you is not asking you to be right. Or to be happy. Or to be something you don’t want.
Love only asks that you look them in the eye once in a while. Not for long, unless you want to. Not forever. Just for a moment so you can recognize them again on the street.
Love this so much, Irisanya. Gratitude. For love and connection, for your beautiful speaking, for being alive.