"Love is supposed to be fun!"

“Love is supposed to be Fun” - Yasmin Al-Salman

Nothing has eluded my understanding more than Love. Maybe that’s because love isn’t something that can be dissected by the analytic mind, it can’t be delayed to a time and place where we can safely explain it from a distance, and it sure can’t be performed or constructed by our minds. Love demands to be felt, experienced, it demands surrender to a living and changing world. The moment we try to hold, capture or contain love with our attachment, we fragment the unity of its experience, we separate ourselves from its reality by taking refuge in the imagined copy of love we live vicariously through in fear of feeling the real thing. Isn’t it bizarre how easy it can be to love an imagined relation we have with the constructed image we preserve of someone rather than loving the real person. Maybe because in our imagined world we can hold their avatar still, we can preserve their ‘love’ or ‘validation’ like Han Solo in a carbon print, in our world we’re in control of this appearance of ‘love’.

In our real experience of love, with our hearts on the line, we’re bare, vulnerable, open to being wounded and cared for by the living and ever-changing fabric of love we surrender to. The real thing means loving and allowing ourselves to be loved by a person whose Heart we have no control over, a Heart just as volatile as our own; it means leaving ourselves bare to a living breathing world of hearts that can reject, abandon, threaten and even die out on us. Whoever said love doesnt take courage is yet to understand the real value of Love. Over time Hearts may learn to be self-sufficient, to find themselves swimming in Divine Love, to love themselves so that they don’t shatter or drown in the currents; but nevertheless, every once in a while I meet some gentle hearts who have thrown themselves in the flame only to come out with peace, Hearts who have flown through the Sun only to come out yawping their outcries of Love’s rebelion. Hearts who have suffered so much only to split themselves open as a big fuck you to a world that forces it shut.

People with open hearts are remarkably courageous. To be so bare and vulnerable, to sit in their being until their sensibility becomes strength, is deceivingly simple. Open hearts have to commit themselves to remain open and loving when facing storms and fearful hearts alike. To walk around in generous spirit despite their encounters with closed door after closed door?? You know how brave you must be to love based solely on your own independent nature to love? To love because it’s who we are, whether we’re loving in the presence of similar hearts or hearts that have grown cold, distant, spiteful in their resistance against the spin of their hearts.

From Avatar the Last Airbender, a Lion Turtle to Ang