On Real Love

I used to have a vision of love as somber, sober, untouchable, and distant. In a cell in the desert, one is never really touched in one's profound being. You are always yours, never anyone else's. You hover over yourself, you live in yourself, and you never really die to yourself. You are alone, infertile, living, but truly non-existent. You are locked in your own soul, waiting for something that will never come.

Now I know what love really is, how it bleeds you sweetly of who you are, how it throws you into joyful lamentation, lifts you up with hooks of hope and sweetness. It is not the solitude of the cloister, but the solitude of being for the other. It is real life, emergence, longing, and the death of a seed in the ground. It emerges, that blessed uncertainty of the Beloved's eyes, more certain than any doctrine, more awesome than the most glorious landscape. I am lost and I return home. She is the negation of my self, and at the same time she is all things...