Hello dear reader,

How are you this week? How is your heart?

Love isn’t a flight, but a walk. We often think of it as an accidental happening—something into which we fall or that strikes us arrow-like beyond our will.

Yet, as countless thinkers, poets, and mystics remind us, love is no mere accident: it is an art and a deliberate discipline that must be learned as any other pursuit of human excellence.

To love, is to step into it, actively and with dedication honing through her teachings our abilities to un-self—honing our heart. Our struggle to recognise love as a practiced skill may be the very thread that knots it with frustration, wrapping our hearts in a haze of confusion.

“How does the human heart — that ancient beast,” asks Maria Popova of The Marginalian, “whose roars and purrs have inspired sonnets and ballads and wars, defied myriad labels too small to hold its pulses, and laid lovers and empires at its altar — unbusy itself from self-consciousness and learn to be a heart?”

All of which is to say: How can a love that holds us—and which we hold within, yearning so acutely to offer it to others, to wrap the world in—unfold into its unbound potential? How can it take us along in its full breath, so that we can become un-selfed, so that we can step into our innermost truth—which is, of course, our love itself?

The path of humble apprenticeship

Love enfolds us mercilessly, entirely spellbound; it makes dark things light, makes hard things easy, or otherwise—it too can leave us darkened, hardened; besieged. A force unto itself, ruled by a law its own—yet within it abides a freedom of wild, spontaneous unfolding and an outcome both inevitable and unshaken: a wellspring of ceaseless vitality. Because, as Leo Tolstoy wrote, love is “the sole and legitimate manifestation of life.”

To dwell in a love that defies form, bending life’s edges and dissolving the known, is to invite a conscious madness—one that shakes the very foundations of being with tremors of sleep-robbing uncertainty. We know we will lose our minds in this endeavour, and still we choose to undertake it.

Under its law, we are asked to honour the depth of what refuses definition, to resist the urge to constrain or name that which exists beyond familiar boundaries—a task demanding both patience and a moral courage of the heart.

Loving is a continuous, unspoken question, one that demands our obedience and surrender without offering any substantial answers to soothe or reassure us. It is a path of “humble apprenticeship,” as David Whyte described it, in which we are asked to give in endless ways without knowing when or how the mysterious gift will be returned.

We might liken love’s force to that of a smith to whom we are apprentices, our hearts the red-hot piece of metal forged into the shape of our hopes, then melted back into shapelessness of bare truth, endlessly and tirelessly.

Nowhere can we escape the cycles of nature—not in living, not in loving. The world around us, with our bodies subjected to it, surges, breaks, falls apart, and remodels itself anew, cyclically. So, too, our hearts break, and remake themselves in a never-ending cycle. To love then, is to sacrifice your heart on the altar of the impossible—a desperate endeavour against the inevitability of ephemerality. Indeed, we often love most fervently as the end of a relationship or a physical form approaches, propelled by that unspelled law of anticipated (yet unexpected) passing.

And yet, love persists, reshaping itself through the thickening time, carrying us forward even as it dissolves what we once held as certain.

There is no name that could be placed on love—a tenderness that tries so vainly to utter itself in our poor, helpless words. “In many ways love has already named us before we can even begin to speak back to it,” observed David Whyte. We can choose whom we let into the fragile, throbbing lands of our hearts, but we cannot choose what this love will do to us—and how. “There is no safe investment,” wrote C.S. Lewis. “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.”

We can, as Lewis noted, try to protect our hearts from breaking by hiding them away, but in that safe, dark casket, our hearts will become motionless, “unbreakable”, “impenetrable” and “irredeemable.”

When a metal isn’t subjected to the process of refinement in high temperatures, it becomes brittle and unworkable. Like an untempered metal, a heart shielded from the heat of life becomes unable to be shaped by love. The only alternative to such tragedy, as Lewis puts it, would be a living damnation—a hellish isolation.

In the seeming inevitability of love, which remains the most intimate of undertakings—a private cosmos shared between souls—there is something that can guide us in living its pressing questions.

Erich Fromm, in The Art of Loving, reminds us that love is not merely a feeling to be stumbled upon, but a discipline requiring the deepest maturation of the self. He argues that “all attempts for love are bound to fail, unless [one] tries most actively to develop [their] total personality.” Too often, we mistake love for something to be received rather than something to be cultivated—a fixation on being lovable rather than on loving.

“To love without knowing how to love wounds the person we love,” warned the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. And it wounds us too. Since pain cannot be avoided—hearts ache whether flung open or locked away—our best hope is to hone our capacity to love.

Fromm likens this to an art that demands both theory and practice, “and there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art.” We live in a culture that, in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, rarely prizes these qualities; nearly all our energy is funnelled into external success—money, prestige, power—leaving too little for learning the art of loving.

Such recognition requires what Iris Murdoch termed unselfing—a difficult, triumphant act for which nature and art uniquely train us. To master the art of love, is to master the skill of leaping beyond oneself—but not simply into another’s arms. It is to leap into the infinite, dipping our fingers in the liquid truth of our existence, where love can finally unfold in its boundless potential, where we, at last, can become what we are meant to become.

Love, then, is not merely about finding the right person, but about the self who does the loving. To love fully is to allow ourselves to be stretched, emptied, and remade. It is both a yearning for the sacred and an initiation into it. If we surrender to its current, we might glimpse—however fleetingly—the divine.

All love is a yearning for the sacred

"Within us and between us, all energy seeks to be love," told me a wise woman who guides me in deepening my felt sense and understanding of the energetic body. Love, in its purest form, is that which allows everything to realise its fullest expression. As Viktor Frankl observed in Man’s Search for Meaning, it is through love that we can truly see another human being’s essence and potential.

Nowhere is our brush with the sacred more direct—or more disorienting—than in love, that wondrous mirror reflecting back the mystery of our own existence. For as we know all too well, it continuously drives us to examine the raw edges of our sanity, which is, of course, where we find God.

Nothing illuminates our nature more fully, or outlines our incompleteness more vividly, than love. To love is to be undone and remade by something larger than ourselves, to glimpse the divine in the ordinary.

In My Bright Abyss, Christian Wiman describes how true love “occurs in the innermost recesses of a person’s spirit,” and yet, it does not merely settle within us; it moves through us, transforming and transcending the personal. Wiman captures this restless, uncontainable force:

"I did not know what love was until I encountered one that kept opening and opening and opening. And until I acknowledged that what that love was opening onto, and into, was God… In any true love—a mother’s for her child, a husband’s for his wife, a friend’s for a friend—there is an excess energy that always wants to be in motion. Moreover, it seems to move not simply from one person to another but through them, toward something else… This is why we can be so baffled and overwhelmed by such love… It wants to be more than it is; it cries out inside of us to make it more than it is. And what it is crying out for, finally, is its essence and origin: God."

All energy seeks to be love. This is one of the hardest negotiations in life: in its deepest form, love asks of us something paradoxical—it demands that we release it. It asks that we let go of our grasp, allowing it to become greater than what we can hold. We might feel love leave us and then reenter us “more truly and more strange,” as Wiman puts it—an uncontainable force that continually transforms us, “like a simple kiss that has a bite of starlight to it."

This is why we turn to art, to nature—to those sublime forces that, as Iris Murdoch described, allow us to experience the gift of unselfing. It is why Willa Cather defined happiness as the feeling of being “dissolved into something complete and great.” Love, at its most profound, is an unmaking of the self, an entry into something vaster.

Nan Shepherd, the Scottish poet and mountaineer, described this surrender with crystalline clarity: “Simply to look on anything (…) with the love that penetrates to its essence, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being.”

And finally, as my pen friend, David (

Life is everyway.
Love is everything.

Love without a self

All is full of love, as Björk sang. All begins and ends in love—though not the kind we’re most accustomed to, rooted in transactions or mutual need. It is a love that emanates throughout, continually, regardless of our preconceptions

I find myself loving each moment in the way the sun loves the world—simply being, letting its life-giving warmth envelop all equally. Of course, I still contain pockets of cold—those parts of me that have been un-loved by separation; places where unfriendliness, hate, and prejudice reside, and where expectations distort my relationship with what is—all yet to be touched by the rays of awareness.

As my being oscillates about an axis of this innermost truth, it finds the freedom to love, which, in Rupert Spira’s quirky phrase, is “the street name of God." Love is a direct and accessible manifestation of the divine, the absence of separation.

If we no longer seek relationships to find love but rather to express, share, and celebrate it, we free those relationships (romantic or otherwise) from the impossible demand of producing love. They become co-creations in which love continually unfolds. As

Seen from this vantage, love can be recognised as a universal presence within and around us, echoing Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj’s insight:

“When I look inside and see that I am nothing, that is wisdom. When I look outside and see that I am everything, that is love. And between these two, my life flows.”

Anatta or anātman—the Buddhist teaching of "not-self,” reminds us no permanent essence dwells within us or anything we perceive. If we ourselves are devoid of a fixed core, and so too are those we love, what then is love? What carries it? If the person or a pet we love has no inherent self, who—or what—are we loving? What remains when all that we cherish inevitably shifts and dissolves?

Far from diminishing love, these questions illuminate its truest nature: if everything is in flux, then love, unbound by a single fixed self, can flow freely. To live without separation, to un-self, is to be love with all things, seeing that no true union was ever possible because no real division ever existed in the first place. Our confusion and suffering arise from clinging to illusions of permanence—trying to fix in place what was never meant to remain unchanged.

The invitation, then, is to recognise this dreamlike nature, to see that there is nothing to grasp and no one to do the grasping. In this recognition, life’s most beautiful moments can arise and pass without un-easing the mind. When we insist on the permanence of self and other, we wage a futile battle against ephemerality itself—one where our hearts become the sacrifice.

The love rooted in its truth is possible precisely because we do not have an inherent self. Because we are empty—because we are not fixed in any one way—love manifests not as a static possession, but an ever-evolving act of presence. We can love others most fully when we see that they, too, are unfixed, continually unfolding.

If love were static and unchanging, it would be no love at all—just an unyielding idea. Its aliveness unfurls in the fluid movement of being; through honing our hearts, we can hold a space vast enough for love to keep refining us endlessly.

Alan Watts once said that love emerges only when we “recognise the impossibility of self-love”—not by condemning ourselves, but by seeing that there is no solid self to love in the first place. Only in relinquishing the illusion of selfhood do we become vessels of love, moving through the world unburdened by the need to claim or control it.

It does not mean we should remain in relationships and situations that harm us. Rather, it means we can rest in our love regardless of external circumstances, aware of its unbound potential which sustains us just as much as it envelops others.

With our hearts honed, our truths refined, we can do as Ram Dass taught: “quieting down until we enter a space in the universe where we are love.” Then we move through the world “watering everything we see” rather than going about like a dry sponge seeking moisture.

This is love without attachment, love leaping beyond self—the kind that seeks not to hold but to flow. To love in this way is not to grasp for something external, but to dissolve into the sweet, penetrating current of existence itself.

To close, a poem by Kahlil Gibran from The Prophet:

When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.
Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.
Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred fire, that you may become sacred bread for God’s sacred feast.

All these things shall love do unto you that you may know the secrets of your heart, and in that knowledge become a fragment of Life’s heart.

But if in your fear you would seek only love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love’s threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.

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A question to you, dear reader:

Are you willing to follow your love all the way to unselfing?

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