love as spiritual redemption

young love is the virgil who saves us from the depths of hell

there seems to be a war against love. young love. the kind that smiles during kisses. the kind that finds strength in tenderness and audacity in inexperience.

love that grows with you. love that sees you through. love that reminds you. no, shows you, perhaps for the first time, that there’s goodness and grace in this morbid world.

in a world where gluttony, avarice, and a lack of regard for your fellow man is incentivized, young love stands as the shield against all forces brought to bring us all into depths of hell.

and if you have ever been there, the depths of hell that is, you’ll know it’s best not to stay there for too long. least you forget who you are, and from whence you came. even more, you might even forget to whom you belong.

regardless, getting thrown out of eden isn’t the end of the world. it’s the beginning of another.

as the indian mystic osho wrote, “it is sometimes beautiful to go even against god.”

in our pursuit of knowledge, of truth that exists outside of doctrine, we can find ourselves lost. even still, innocence, in its most potent form, is never having sinned, but being able to find our way back home even if we have. and if you’re lost, young love stands as a winged angel on a mountaintop ready to guide us back to whence we came.

“love moved me, and makes me speak.”

in his introduction to dante alighieri’s the divine comedy, eugenio montale wrote “…with the help of forces greater than himself, [he] saw his invention become reality…[and] he was obligated to come out of his labyrinth and rejoin his fellow men.”

how many of us are lost in labyrinths of our own making, desperately seeking to return to whence we came? searching for recognition of who we once were.

the saint virgil told dante, who woke to him himself within a shadowed forest on good friday in the year 1300:

“your soul has been assailed by cowardice,

which often weighs so heavily on a man—

distracting him from honorable trials…”

at the top of this year, i wrote that in these times, our only way forward is to become own witness; own historian; own archivist.

to witness ourselves becoming, even if circumstance says otherwise.

but the heroine’s journey is long. often, you’ll be asked to dive deep into the belly of the beast just for the chance to stake your claim in this world.

it can be exhausting. becoming. the pain of birthing one’s self over and over and over again. until each frankenstein baby is better than the last; having learned from the mistakes of its predecessors.

this exhaustion can lead to burnout. complete fatigue from fighting both the outer world and our inner demons.

when we feel the weariness in our bones, where can we rest our souls?

i used to believe there’s no rest for the wicked. certainly not for young women with an axe to grind.

but this relationship to work, as constant and unrelenting, does not a life make.

a future it might secure, but living?

that requires space.

space to breathe; space to rest; space to dream.

if you’re working night and day, with no breaks in between, you’re in no better condition that those who had their lives from exodus 1:11–14 “made bitter with hard service."

but i find that this ruthless work ethic is valorized; lauded, even.

one’s worth becomes wrapped in institutions who value your output, not your input.

one’s dignity is mapped to prestige, not provenance. not the life you’ve lived that has made you who you are.

in a world with all work and no play, there’s simply no time to reminisce. there’s work to be done!

and so you forget to live. to dream. to rest. to breathe.

and you wind yourself up so tightly in timelines, deadlines, and to-do lists that you completely forgot why you got into the game to begin with.

in fact, you’ve completely forgotten you were even playing to begin with.

and with this realization; this sinking feeling that there has to be more. more life; more dreams; more rest; more breathes to take, you realize that you oriented yourself to the wrong star.

that the game you were hunting isn’t worth the bait.

that there’s more to life than arduous work.

and in this clarity, young love emerges as a recounting of the possibility of more.

in reading the divine comedy, one begins to understand that hell is not an inferno but a place without hope.

a space devoid of the possibility of more. the probability of different.

young love stands as the rebel to this thinking.

that more does exist.

dreams can come true.

and absurdity, through abstract in its orientation, can manifest with enough force of will and commitment to the dream.

but it’s hard to maintain such positivity if one is not trained in the laws of universe.

that their words are spells. writing, its own form of scripture. so it’s best to be mindful what we say. and the words we allow to permeate our minds.

but when you have a guide, a lover even, waiting for you on the other side; one who chants your name so you don’t lose you sense of direction to the exit, half, if not all, of the pressure is lifted from you.

it’s easy to accomplish supposedly insurmountable when someone is rooting for you. when someone looks at you and sees only grace.

should you not have the capacity to do that for yourself, for what ever reason, it is advisable to find it within young love.

you might ask what separates old love from young love.

several things as there are several meanings.

you have lovers who have known each other for years. decades even. there’s a steadiness, a predictability in their dynamic.

after each tussle one says, “i’ll see you in prague” to which the other quips, “but i’ll be in berlin.”

it’s about meeting the moment. nothing more, nothing else. it’s an unhurried rhythm that seems deceptively easy to maintain.

young love is clumsier in its execution. more earnest.

she says, “i’d followed you to mars.” he tells her, “and i’ll make sure we land in montecito.”

neither one is better than the other. just different in its origin and much more exacting in its orientation.

you should lean towards the side you prefer.

preferences, after all, are a girl’s best friend.

but to the point of young and old.

i had once found that older men were like wool coats. there was a weight to them i found comforting.

i have since realized i preferred such a heavy jacket due to the world i found myself in: frigid, until the very end. even the wind had teeth.

and it was only when he took me away, somewhere warmer; where the oceans were aquamarine and the sand whiter than the sun, that i realized: in the absence of institutional fights, i’d much rather be sunbathing in the caribbean.

and so, i too, began to consider a little thing called ease.

to embrace fully that maybe, just maybe, life is not a constant series of proving myself to systems that care for my heart but not for its beating.

and that if i’m going to seek approval from any institution, let it be the institution of family.

and so young love came in and saved me from the labyrinth of my overthinking, prone-to-spiral brain.

encouraged me to come out from beneath my own shadow. to not seek approval from the outer world nor suffer in institutional settings to prove a point; but to dare, in legitimate ways, to be all that i can be.

virgil, in guiding dante through the ante-inferno, tells him:

“here one must leave behind all hesitation;

here every cowardice must meet its death.

…these wretched ones, who never were alive.”

what does it mean to be alive, if not to allow one’s heart to open to another? fully. totally. and with grace.

macbeth said it best, “who could refrain, that had a heart to love and in that heart courage to make love known?”

one can argue that everything macbeth did, he did for his wife. another argument can be made that even in her treachery, all lady macbeth wanted was the best for her husband.

and in their own lovesick way, these cut-throats embodied young love.

to those who are spiraling; dancing between being the best the game has ever seen and simply deciding you’re too beautiful to work (hard), consider a third option:

transcending into something unprecedented.

from this side of things, my lasting question to you is, “how imaginative can you be when you realize you cannot fail?”

sweet dreams,
a diouana woman

p.s. truth or dare

you know how in your diary, you write something down then rip it out and place it in the tiny makeup bag you keep in your purse as a manifestation method? yeah, these p.s. truth or dares are the digital versions of my little ripped off notes.

truth: true love as spiritual healing.

dare: forsaking love; true love.

disclaimer: the views expressed in this essay are those of the author and do not reflect the views of any employer, past or current.