Love without Taking
We were fully met without being held,
fully undressed without being claimed.
Water is second only to air in the need for man's existence. Neither ever end, just always change. There are experiences in life that do not ask to be kept, moments and people who change us and who themselves are changed in state. They never go away and are essential to our existence.
They arrive and awake us from life's slumber. That sleep we did not know we were even experiencing. Not the restful sleep of peace and nod, but an ignorance to what life can truly be. Lest the waking melt the world, it insists on restraint — not because waking is wrong, but because the power of the conversion, the state change is so powerful, like a collapsing star it risks consuming everything in its gravity well.. The mistake is thinking that only what can be held or continued counts as real. As though duration were the measure of truth. As if owning made a moment valid.
It does not.
Sometimes the most honest form of love is recognition without possession. Seeing another person clearly — not as fantasy, not as rescue, not as an answer to loneliness — but as a whole, complex, bounded human being. And allowing that recognition to exist without trying to turn it into a future, or a promise, or a rupture.
There is no blame in that kind of seeing.
There is thrill. There is excitement and ecstasy. Wonder. Joy. And, conversely, lament when we realize that our slumber and ignorance came with some blisses that can never be reclaimed. Once awake, we cannot return to the land of nod. Even if we wanted to.
Falling in love is not a moral failure. It is not a plan. It is not a demand. It is something that happens when two inner lives briefly align closely enough to recognize one another. That alignment leaves marks — not scars, but understanding.
A widening of the map.
What matters is what we do after we recognize what’s there. When we stir and realize we have the power to do as we wish. Knowledge is power. And it is easy to become drunk with it. The power to lay lives to waste, or to ascend to unknown heights.
Not every love is meant to be consummated through physical possession. Some are consummated through truth — through the courage to let someone in so utterly, completely that what is discovered could heal or kill. Real love will allow another person be exactly who they are, in the life they are actually living, without asking them to abandon it for us.
This is so much easier said than done. The want that comes with this kind of release is equal in pull and power.
True love is complicated and powerful. It is the kind of love does not erase boundaries. It respects them.
There is a particular kind of love that makes art, not wreckage. A love that sharpens perception, deepens language, softens the way we see the world — without burning down the structures that hold real lives together. This is not a lesser love. It is a disciplined one. A love that understands the difference between expression and destruction.
Creation and devastation use the same fire. The difference is where it is contained.
Duty and loyalty are often misunderstood as the enemies of passion. As though choosing them were a kind of death. But in truth, they are what refine passion — what prevent it from turning corrosive or hollow. They are not the absence of desire; they are its steward.
There is honor in choosing not to take everything we want.
There is integrity in recognizing that some things are precious precisely because they are not consumed.
Loyalty does not negate longing. It gives it context.
And sometimes, the ultimate reward — whatever form it takes — is made sweeter not by immediacy, but by restraint. By knowing that we were capable of more than impulse. That we could hold something beautiful without demanding it become ours.
There is mercy — real mercy — in releasing one another from the burden of “what might have been.”
No one is at fault for recognizing another soul.
No one is required to destroy their life to prove that recognition was sincere.
Some connections exist to remind us that we are capable of depth, tenderness, and truth — and then they let us go back to our lives carrying that knowledge quietly, like a secret competence.
A proof of life.
A proof of love.
That is not failure.
That is a form of completion. Two nakednesses and a merging of soul without body.
I am awake. I do not know what tomorrow brings. But today, I am alive. The ground beneath me is real. Ancient. I am young and foolish. One day, I too will be ancient, maybe then I will understand all this I wrote.
For now, all I can do in my ignorance is trust that is must be true.
It must.
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Thank you for coming here and walking through the garden of my mind. No day is as brilliant in its moment as it is gilded in memory. Embrace your experience and relish gorgeous recollection.
Into every life a little light will shine. Thank you for being my luminance in whatever capacity you may. Shine on, you brilliant souls!
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