This is likely the last thing I will read before heading into the Scottish highlands for a small intimate solstice gathering in a place where the only signaling will be offered by hearts and not phone masts. I go to a space where our underlying foundation is unconditional love for one another. I am incurably mad in that way. Heart as big as a whale..I love this essay. Unconditionally. It is the perfect prayer to begin my journey of immersion with. Bless you Tamara. See you on the other side. 🙏❤️🙏
And what a send-off you’ve given me — this might be the most poetic “Out of Office” message I’ve ever received.
To walk into the Highlands with a heart like a whale and no signal but soul… that’s not only madness, it’s memory. The memory of how we used to connect before we bartered intimacy for bandwidth. Before we needed apps to remind us we were worthy of love.
Your journey sounds like a living version of this essay: untethered, untracked, and utterly unafraid to feel. May the moss be soft beneath your feet, the fire warm against your cheeks, and the love, mad, messy, unearned, rise like mist from the heather.
Love is a biochemical response; it's chemistry. But we don't conceptualize it that way, and to suggest to a random person, for example, that they love their spouse or child due to a chemical reaction in the brain would surely offend them most of the time, even though it's true.
There's clearly a reason for that; maybe an adaptive one. Maybe it's because love can't endure rational calculus because 1) we're not all that capable of it and 2) rational calculation is more likely to leave you terrified and shivering in the corner than motivated, by love or otherwise, to act; to fight back; to endure; and to just enjoy the little moments of connection.
It's therefore absurd to treat relationships as some sort of cost-benefit analysis; to circumvent 200,000 years of instincts to perform something that merely resembles rationality; and to allow metrics both to diminish the incalculable and intangible aspects of human relationships, and to render us shivering in that corner, alone and terrified, because our relationship didn't fill out some random checklist written by someone monetizing cynicism to pay for their third divorce.
Stunning, Tamara. Don't confuse my analysis for engagement-farming or fulfilling some mutually beneficial obligation; I comment because I want to.
What a magnificent takedown of the rationalist delusion. I felt the applause rising somewhere near my hypothalamus.
Yes, biochemically, love may begin as a cascade of neurotransmitters. But to flatten it to that is like saying a symphony is just vibrating air. Technically true. Profoundly false. The human need to transcend our chemistry is perhaps the most human instinct of all.
And you’re right, the cost-benefit model not only misunderstands love, it actively sabotages it. It replaces awe with audit. But love is not a management consultancy. It does not exist to optimise your nervous system. It exists to ignite it.
Your point about fear is especially important. If we try to think our way into safety, we lose the very courage that love demands. Because love is not safe. But it is sane, in the oldest, wildest sense of sanity: a return to instinct, to presence, to the unbearable beauty of irrational connection.
I’ll also take your final line as high praise. No metrics required, Andrew! Not between us!
Lately I’ve sensed that your essays are chronicling my own katabasis into deeper dimensions of love. How wonderfully strange to be witnessed by a writer I’ve never met. And to know that the shape of our longing, the intricacy of the heart, is shared. Thank you for your fidelity to the subtleties of the soul.
What a gift of a comment, thank you for meeting me in the underworld with your lantern lit, Tyler!
Katabasis is the perfect word. This descent, not into despair, but into depth, where love stops being a story we perform and becomes something carved into bone. It’s where the glitter burns off, and what’s left is raw, trembling, sacred. And yes, strangely shared.
If my words have mirrored your passage, it’s because we’re walking ancient terrain. The terrain where longing is not shameful, but mythic, where solitude becomes communion, where the fidelity isn’t to outcome, but to truth.
So I’ll keep writing from the shadows if you keep reading from the fire. We’re not alone down here. And that changes everything!
Tamara, this is staggering in both form and force—essay, manifesto, scalpel no less. You’ve named what our culture has forgotten: that love, in its raw, declarative state, is not a transaction but an existential posture.
What you’ve written isn’t just emotionally brave, it’s intellectually defiant. Your metaphor of love as heresy in a forensic culture is brilliant, and here’s a nuance I would like to add: just as belief without proof is often scorned in an age of scientism, love without reciprocity is now seen as a glitch, not a grace. We've collapsed affect into economics—every feeling needs a receipt.
There’s also a neurobiological angle here worth surfacing, we’ve become addicted to reward prediction, dopamine spikes only when validation confirms expectation. But love that exists without expectation breaks this loop. It doesn’t reward the self in the usual ways, but rather enlarges it. It’s not optimization; it’s overflow.
And maybe that’s your point? in a scarcity-primed, metric-saturated world, unconditional love is not sentimental—it’s subversive. You’re reclaiming it as independent action. And that’s not madness. It’s mastery.
Your comment, Alexander, reflects back understanding and amplifies the entire scaffolding of my essay. Thank you for this amazing articulation!
Yes, exactly, we’ve pathologised grace. Love without return is now seen not as rarefied strength, but as emotional miscalculation. Just as belief without proof is dismissed as superstition in a world drunk on empiricism, love without ROI is written off as weakness, or worse, as a lack of self-respect. But maybe the real self-respect is refusing to let your heart be domesticated by demand curves?
And the neurobiological nuance you’ve added is essential because we’ve hacked our emotional circuitry with validation loops, trained the self to chase only what delivers a dopamine hit. But love that exists beyond feedback, that doesn’t spike or crash with response, it moves us from circuitry to soul. From reaction to revelation. As you so brilliantly put it, not optimisation, but overflow. Not conditioning, but creative expansion.
And that’s exactly the point, to love unconditionally in a world trained for transaction is not regression but a form of revolt. It’s a refusal to live small. A heresy, indeed… but the kind that births new truths.
Thank you for meeting it with such intellectual fire and emotional fluency!
This moved through me like scripture. Not because it comforted me but because it unnerved something honest in me that I’d quietly exiled. You unmasked love. Stripped of its performance, its metrics, its Instagrammed martyrdom. What you’ve framed here is an act of reclamation, emotional independence in a world obsessed with ROI. And you did it with such incredible precision and poetic brutality, I felt seen in places I forgot I had.
Your articulation of love as defiant presence, not contingent privilege, is one of the most spiritually radical things I’ve read in years. It reminded me that sometimes, choosing to love anyway is an act of self respect. Thank you, Tamara, for refusing the algorithmic flattening of feeling. This is beautiful, and it’s dangerous in the best way.
This might be the most exquisitely dangerous compliment I’ve ever received. Thank you, Céline! Truly.
Ye, what you’ve named so powerfully is the core heresy: that love, unperformed, unmonetised, unhinged from worthiness, is not weakness anymore, it’s a form of independence. To love without needing a spreadsheet to prove its value is, in this world, nearly criminal. And yet… it is also the last true freedom.
I’m moved that it unnerved something in you. That’s the feeling I trust the most, when a truth rattles. Love was never meant to be a performance review. And reclaiming it as self-respect (as spiritual defiance) that’s the revolution hiding in plain sight.
Here’s to the unflattened. The unfiltered. The unrepentantly tender. May we love dangerously… and live to tell it.
I adore this one. What I feel when I read this is permission -- because at some point, we become adults too wrapped up in "what's best," & how to avoid the heartache of loving without being loved in return, & the endless loop of attempting to intellectualize what we were made to *feel* -- rather than humans with ravenous hearts that love, just to love. That want & long & ache to pour that love out, without needing it to make any sense. xx
Yes, exactly…. somewhere along the line, we traded in our instinct to love wildly for a spreadsheet titled “Emotional Risk Management”. And the irony? It didn’t save us from heartache…. it just made the heartache quieter, duller, more internalised.
But you’re right, we weren’t built for emotional restraint; we were built to overflow. Permission is the perfect word here. Not permission to be reckless but to be real. To long without apology. To ache without analysis. To love, not like an algorithm seeking a match, but like a fire seeking oxygen.
You don’t have to justify a ravenous heart. It’s not a design flaw. It’s your divinity showing.
Thanks, Tamara, for writing to what the soul longs to express without limitations, without exception, without explanation. This sacred fount is so deep and ready to quench the thirst of our longings. May we not be distracted by the superficial, the "comfortably numb" existence of the "cultured". May our hearts be uncontrollably wildly in love...
Amen to every word, this is the benediction I didn’t know I needed.
Naming that thirst is somehow holly, the one not satisfied by curated lives or intellectualised feelings, but only by the unruly flood of soul-deep connection. The kind that doesn’t ask for permission, that overflows polite teacups and ruins the linen with its aliveness.
And yes, may we stay wild. May our hearts refuse to be domesticated by irony, or numbed by “nuance”. Let others sip from shallow pools of cleverness… we will drink from the fount that tastes like longing, like risk, like love unabridged on the other hand.
No explanations. No exceptions. Just the sacred chaos of feeling fully.
Your words touched me. What a sad world we live in where we need to justify the love that we feel.
I too love people who I am told do not deserve it, with whom my contact is infrequent and guarded. I love them because I loved them once and love is like energy - it cannot be destroyed, only transmuted. So I love those people in a form that is outside of the rhetoric of love languages, which assumes that love is something that is always expressive and engaged. Love can forever and enduring, while we keep our distance, while we wish them the best life has to offer, while we choose to remain out of their lives.
Yes, yes, yes to all of this. What you describe is a love that has graduated from performance. A love that doesn’t need to be visible to be real. It’s not the kind that shows up in anniversary posts or matching sweaters but the kind that sits quietly in the soul like a candle in a room no one enters anymore, still lit.
You have named something powerful: that love endures not because it is expressed, but because it exists. And you’re right, the modern rhetoric of love languages, as helpful as it can be, often reduces love to something transactional, observable, and affirming. But some love is spectral. Some love is lunar. It exists at a distance, and yet it shapes our tides.
To love someone silently, distantly, without demand or reward, is a kind of grace our culture doesn’t know what to do with. But it is no less sacred. In fact, maybe it’s the most sacred because it asks for nothing but to remain true to its own origin.
Oh. Yes, this was certainly worth the bated breath. You are far from a fool, and no, you are definitely not a coward, not with your unlicensed heart. My head is beginning to ache with the unshed tears, you have opened so many doors, so many memories, so damn much love.
“…what about the silent courage of loving anyway?” This could have been written about Shakespeare’s Viola - the only character that makes me wish I could act. I understand her from the inside out - there was no lack of courage. She didn’t tell her love because he was already in love with someone else. Instead she tried to help him woo his lady.
Okay, I didn’t go that far. But the first time I fell in love I had no blueprint to follow, no idea what to do, and when I realized she was already in a relationship, well, hell. There was no choice. I grew up on King Arthur, Robin Hood, and even as a child had a well-developed sense of honour (though my sister will tell you it was a little warped at times). I kept my feelings to myself and took a lot of grief later when I shared that with one or two friends. They couldn’t believe I wouldn’t speak up; the notion of staying silent, being honourable and loving in silence, made no sense to them. Eventually I did express my love in a book that was something of a very late love letter. She died before it was completed, and I don’t know if I’d have had the courage to share it with her. I’d like to think so, because it was more of a thank you than anything.
“This love is not meek or martyred - it’s mutinous…It loves in spite of being told it shouldn’t.” Years later, I was told I couldn’t be with someone, because she wasn’t emotionally able to love me. Intellectually I understood why they said it and why it was true in a way (trauma-related). At the same time, I was there and they weren’t. I looked into her eyes and they didn’t. I knew what I saw, however fleeting. And I also backed away, because the best chance she had of healing was if I did, for reasons that had nothing to do with me. It fucking broke me. Like nothing else in my life. And thankfully she did heal, but the same people kept insisting it was never real. It was years before I stopped loving her. Not because I expected a different outcome. Just - because.
“It means understanding love…as…something you want to give because you want to live in a state of generosity rather than scarcity.” Now that was a very different kind of love. I was the head cook in a community and people in that position were usually one of two kinds: coming from scarcity or coming from generosity. I followed in the footsteps of my teacher whole heartedly in the generosity mode. I made a sign with a quote from her - “The Kitchen is a Place of Love” and hung it in my office. When I found people stealing, and they did, I let them know they had my permission to take what they needed, just to let me know so I could make sure we didn’t unexpectedly run out. And I did ask the person who stole cookies not to take the ones marked for meetings, but that I’d make sure there were always others he could take. I never understood the stingy ones. Our job was to nourish a community, and that is a job of love.
There were other words in this essay and your replies to comments that applied to all of these, and took me to some unexpected places.
“…we’re walking ancient terrain, the terrain where longing is not shameful, but mythic, where solitude becomes communion, where the fidelity isn’t to outcome, but to truth.”
“ferocious in devotion”
“…to be a person who choses to love because that is the orientation of their soul…”
“…the realm of the spiritually untameable.”
“…to love is not a response, but an identity…”
“…to love is not a response, but an identity…” Yeah, that one made me shed a few tears. All I could think was, “My ‘why?’” I’ll need some more time with that.
You did, by the way, make me laugh out loud - “DMV of Decorum” - :)
But I did not laugh at your manifesto. I repeat, you are not a fool. And you have the courage of ten thousand heroes (and heroines).
What an exquisite, soul-laid-bare gift, thank you for sharing this heartbreak-laced history, this lived love-letter to dignity, restraint, and the unclaimed spaces where the fiercest kind of love often takes root!
Your story reads like something written in the margins of epic myths, where the real valour isn’t in conquest, but in containment. In loving quietly, ethically, without demand or detonation. Viola is the perfect parallel, her silence was structure, not submission. A scaffolding built to hold a love that would never be housed in return. And like you, she never stopped being true. Not to an outcome. But to herself.
Your kitchen, that was a temple. Not the stingy kind where love is measured in ladles, but the kind where generosity is philosophy. Love without evidence doesn’t always come in the form of longing glances and Shakespearean ache. Sometimes it looks like letting someone steal cookies with dignity. That is spiritual musculature.
And yes, “to love is not a response, but an identity”. That line hit me, too, when I wrote it. It came out like an arrow, and I wasn’t entirely sure where it had flown until I saw it land in others. Like it did in you. We often think love must be earned, provoked, reciprocated. But some of us love because it’s simply who we are, like having green eyes or a limp in the soul.
Your grief, your mutiny, your laughter at the DMV of Decorum (because we all need that, too), they’re all part of the same fire. You have not wasted your love. You have witnessed with it. And when everyone is obsessed with winning, that might be the most heroic thing of all.
Ten thousand thanks for seeing me! I see you, too.
It’s no coincidence that the teacher on the sign in my kitchen, who taught my teacher kitchen practice, was also the founder of Zen Hospice - his generosity found many outlets.
One correction in what I wrote. I said it took years to stop loving the woman I had to back away from, but I never stopped loving her, the love transformed into a love that could be okay letting go of the hope it would turn out different.
Can you say more about “a limp in the soul?” The phrase kind of tugs at my heart.
I actually like that you didn’t stop loving her, but that the love transformed, yes, that’s precisely the kind of love my essay hopes to dignify. Not the love that clings to an outcome, but the one that releases the storyline while keeping the soul-thread intact. A love that lets go without erasing.
As for “a limp in the soul”… it’s the phrase that came to me when I tried to describe what it feels like to be shaped by love that was real, but perhaps incomplete, or unreciprocated, or impossible. It’s not quite a wound anymore, but it’s also not nothing. It’s the spiritual echo of having walked too long with your heart leaning in one direction. A kind of tenderness that doesn’t fully go away. You move forward. You live. You love again. But there’s always a slight tilt, a softness, a memory in your gait because some loves alter the way you walk through the world, even after you have learned to walk on.
It’s not damage… It’s evidence. And in its own way, it’s grace.
This made me weep. You have a way of capturing and expressing things I don’t fully understand myself until I read your words. “…some loves alter the way you walk through the world, even after you have learned to walk on.”
“So here is my heresy, my confession, my warning shot and benediction: I will love you without your permission. I will love you before you prove yourself. I will love you and I may still leave. But I will not be edited by your readiness or reshaped by your refusal. I will not wait for you to earn something I am already overflowing with. Love without evidence is not a flaw. It is not a pathology. It is a choice – the only one I know how to make that makes me feel like I am not wasting this life. And maybe I will be called a fool. Maybe I am one. But at least I am not a coward. And that, for me, is enough.”
What a beautiful invocation, yes, Levinas is here, pulsing in the margins. That radical ethics of the face. That insistence that the Other is not an object to be earned or justified, but a presence that demands responsibility before reciprocity.
To love before proof, to respond before permission… that’s Levinasian to the core. Not because it’s sentimental, but because it’s ethical. You don’t love someone because they check the boxes. You love because, in their face (in their sheer, irreducible existence) you encounter the impossible demand to respond with yourself.
And maybe that’s the fiercest kind of love: not one that waits for the rules, but one that answers before the question is even formed. Not cowardice. Not foolishness. But the deepest, most human courage of all.
I find myself wondering why all this feeling talk is directed only towards other two footers and not say, our four footers, or a standing person, a sacred tree, or mountain daimon person, or a God person, or an all consuming art piece for which one pours all their love for its expression, like a Michelangelo's David. Or people's hobbies for which they fully invest themselves into, and for what? I've given myself to projects like you have given your love to other people, and it carries the same gravitas without any metrics of return on the investment of one's energy. I've watched a building be excavated for which I poured so many hours making something work and that took a bricolage of magic to render. Or other projects which I've had to walk away from after the hard work to fully manifest a vision. I've earned nothing from any of this, yet there is the sense that, like the property I'm at now, the presence I've brought to the place speaks of a spirit moving within me, and gives life back through one's own witness, in this ephemeral flowing now, of a beauty born from the wilderness of the given. Or like "the love of place, that grows into the body", our loves are not just for humans but, whatever makes us present to ourselves is the metric, the evidence, the proof in the pudding that our love was not in vain, however it is received, because it became us. The man who became a mountain, like Thoreau's Walden Pond, our loves grow us by bearing witness to our presence.
This is the deeper current beneath the whole essay, and you’ve caught it in your bare hands.
What you’re naming is love as devotion, not confined to romance, or even people, but to presence. To place, to art, to the invisible architectures we build with our spirit, our hours, our breath. A love not tethered to the relational, but to the relationality of being itself.
You’re right, of course, we have made the mistake of narrowing love talk to the domain of the interpersonal, as though only human-to-human connection were worthy of our full surrender. But what about the tree you pass daily and nod to like an old friend? What about the house you’ve painted, repainted, filled with light? What about the field you walked into and suddenly remembered who you were?
To love something, be it a person, a project, a godform, or a half-finished sculpture no one else will ever see, is to inhabit it with your being. The act of loving becomes indistinguishable from the act of becoming. And that’s the point, isn’t it? Not what you get, but what you grow into.
“The wilderness of the given”. Yes. That. The love that arises not from desire or need, but from the sheer astonishment of existing alongside something else with reverence. Whether it’s Michelangelo’s David or a foundation you laid by hand, it doesn’t matter. The love made it real. Not the outcome. The witnessing.
And so yes again, love without evidence is never in vain. Because the proof isn’t in who or what returns it. The proof is in who you became while offering it. The mountain doesn’t say thank you. It just becomes part of your bones.
Ah, Levy-Brule's participation mystique when subject-object blur the boundaries in a shared identity, Alfred Schutz calls the pure-we and Buber the I-Thou, where I am no longer an isolate but enter into a symbiosis with an other person, project, godform, objet d'art, in a living process that becomes the horizon of ones being. Connection is the key for our identity to grow, to participate in "the relationality of being itself", in dreams as well in the waking world. Ours is a Shakespearian cosmos in which our language furnishes the eidos with which to see the play we're in, as we enact our role. Be it Love's Labors Lost or Romeo and Juliet, the whole worlds' a play, or even a dream within a dream from which like history we strive to awaken from, like "the field you walked into and suddenly remembered who you are" in the dream we can become conscious that it is a dream and your body is sleeping in its bed. So love as devotion is about our identity becoming present to the psychical "relationality of being itself", in the field of primordial reality, remembering the given breadth of here and the animating breath of now on a wandering planet whose sole purpose is our presence, sub specie aeternitatis. Thank you for this dance, Tamara!
When the spirit moves through one in prolonged act of creation, I become that process, there is no surrender per se; yes one could be doing something other I suppose, but giving presence to what is moving from within you is uppermost and much greater than elsewise living ones everyday. The small self surrendering to ones larger self? Or is there another way to say it: I've been abducted by aliens, or the muse had her way with me, or I was inspired, or letting go into the unknown I came upon a "road less traveled" and voila, this piece de resistance? Surrender like a mother birthing her baby, well yes, but the life is the driving force, and of course, the love. I'm not relinquishing anything rather one is grabbing hold of a mystery that wants your eyes to see and become present for it, the baby of our creation. You could say no, abort, and go another way, stay in ones small self and live from there. I just don't see the notion of "surrender" doing justice to the motivation inherent in creating something out of the blue, do you?
I agree with all your great descriptions. For me there is an “allowing”, making space for the energies you describe, that can only be possible in a “letting go”.
Hard to put words to it… a courageous or insane step into “undiscovered country”.
Or maybe the way Rumi describes becoming/ allowing to become a slave.
The simplest answer may be that early on my “creativity” was a threat to others.
Maybe its an impetus from necessity, when my will is infused by something greater and "it" takes one into that "undiscovered country" that wasn't on the radar before, and from which I become more of who I really am, more of my totality. In other words a creative endeavor is something I have to do or my life is not worth living; like a stage of life one has to go through to in order to answer the call, to fulfill the quest that brought one here in the first place.
A rich and passionate reply, and I like that we’re circling the same mystery from different altitudes. We may be using different metaphors, but I believe we’re speaking to the same interior flame.
When I say surrender, I don’t mean passivity, nor abdication of will or vision. I mean the precise moment when the ego (sharp-edged, controlling, time-bound) releases its grip just enough for something deeper, stranger, wilder to slip through. It’s not the absence of action, it’s the suspension of authorship. Not “I relinquish”, but “I yield to what’s larger than me, and let it move through my hands”.
Yes, perhaps I could be doing something else, but I’m not. Not because I forced it, but because I allowed myself to be taken. Not unlike your alien abduction metaphor (which I like) except that the ship is coming from within. And while I appreciate your phrase “grabbing hold of a mystery”, I would say for me it’s more that the mystery grabs hold of me. The act of writing, or painting, or birthing something from silence, often feels less like I’m driving and more like I’m being driven by something I can’t name, only honour.
The mother-birthing metaphor you mentioned is, to me, actually the most aligned with my version of surrender. It’s not that she isn’t active, she is profoundly present, but she must let the body do what the body knows. There’s pain, there’s effort, there’s breathing and choice but there’s also trust. Trust in the thing that’s trying to be born.
So no, we’re not so different. I’m not saying surrender means letting go of agency. I’m saying it means letting go of domination. Of insisting on form before the spirit has arrived. And maybe, sometimes, the greatest creative power is in precisely that: the willingness to be moved.
now, that's something i can say i agree with! in gratitude i'll send you an unfinished, unpolished poem i've been writing on since a few weeks already, on and off. it's not done, it's not good, it's just a little poem:
What a small, perfect tremor of a poem. Unfinished? Maybe. But it’s already whole in the way that a heartbeat is whole… brief, unedited, undeniable.
Its structure is very tender… your no / my even so. That’s the whole theology of unconditional love in four words. Not resignation, but reverence. A devotion that doesn’t flinch at refusal, but meets it with presence.
Don’t rush to polish it, please! Some poems are meant to stay a little raw, like skin still remembering touch. Thank you for sharing this fragment, Ivy, it hums. I love it!
Yes! A heart that never went to DMV of decorum. That didn’t wait for emotional insurance before flooring it down the wrong side of affection.
An unlicensed heart is gloriously feral. It doesn’t signal, it doesn’t ask for clearance, and it sure as hell doesn’t parallel park its feelings to fit the occasion. It loves like it just broke out of the metaphorical institution, wild-eyed, windblown, grinning.
And maybe that’s what we need more of. Not love that plays by the rules, but love that rewrites them mid-sentence. That shows up barefoot to the black-tie event of your life and says, “I’m here anyway”.
Oh Bliss unbounded! Another Tamara essay on our wayward souls. Printed off for later as WHY AM I AT MY PC when I could be in the Garden (of Eden). Though I was having a coffee post one hour of watering in our lovely … can it be?… summer!
Ohhhh, what a glorious image, you, coffee in hand, essay freshly printed, garden glistening like some half-repentant Eden. I almost want to rewrite the piece to include you as a character: the reader who pauses watering paradise just long enough to gather words like wildflowers and tuck them between the pages of her morning.
Honestly, what better way to read about reckless, unlicensed love than surrounded by the sensual excess of summer? I’m honoured to be joining you there in ink, if not in body.
Now go, back to the garden! That’s where the best heresies begin anyway.
Eventually he escapes the garden! But not for long; this being my morning deal with emails, dip into Substack then back into Paradise. Cooler this morning; will water the new plants and then the daily deadhead. For a Deadhead.
Then think - where can I plant the two funky Primrose my oldest son gave me, he rapidly becoming an excellent gardener himself.
Yes, what a splendid heresy that first garden gave us. And thanks as ever, Tamara, for an intriguing and illuminating essay. You have a special gift and the number of subscribers you have attest to that!
Yes, and what a tragedy, really, that we now need reasons to feel, as if the heart were a courtroom and every emotion must submit evidence before being allowed to speak.
We have outsourced our instincts to algorithms, our affections to analytics. But feeling for no reason… that’s the original freedom. That’s the jazz of being alive. Children do it. Artists do it. Lovers in the rain do it. It’s not irrational, it’s human!!!
When we forget how to feel for no reason, we don’t become more mature. We become more marketable. And what a dull trade that is…. at least for me!
Your writing is stunning—clear-eyed and full of depth. There’s a kind of beauty in the way your insights unfold, like light catching on something that was always there, just waiting to be seen.
This kind of love that does not expect any benefit or exchange of love for love takes a destructive form in societies surrounded by strict social customs and religious controls.
It turns into a delicious secret that lives with you every second, is present with you like a song, and makes everything around you a poem.
The most sadistic and self-defeating thing is to hide this love from the one you love, and to preserve it like a bottle of expensive perfume.
Yes, when the world is too rigid to hold that kind of love, it doesn’t disappear; it becomes art. A secret, yes, but not one of shame. A sacred one, like contraband joy smuggled past the border guards of propriety.
In societies where the expression of unreciprocated or “inappropriate” love is taboo, love doesn’t die… it shapeshifts. It becomes metaphor, music, metaphor again. It infiltrates daily life like scent on a scarf: invisible, undeniable, unshakable. You sip your tea, and there it is. You walk past a certain window, and it hums again.
And yes, what exquisite pain… to preserve it, unopened, like some divine contraband. But also, what power. To hold love not for transaction or performance, but for poetry. To let it perfume your life, not theirs. Maybe that’s the truest act of devotion? To love so deeply it writes you into a poem, even if they never read it.
This is likely the last thing I will read before heading into the Scottish highlands for a small intimate solstice gathering in a place where the only signaling will be offered by hearts and not phone masts. I go to a space where our underlying foundation is unconditional love for one another. I am incurably mad in that way. Heart as big as a whale..I love this essay. Unconditionally. It is the perfect prayer to begin my journey of immersion with. Bless you Tamara. See you on the other side. 🙏❤️🙏
And what a send-off you’ve given me — this might be the most poetic “Out of Office” message I’ve ever received.
To walk into the Highlands with a heart like a whale and no signal but soul… that’s not only madness, it’s memory. The memory of how we used to connect before we bartered intimacy for bandwidth. Before we needed apps to remind us we were worthy of love.
Your journey sounds like a living version of this essay: untethered, untracked, and utterly unafraid to feel. May the moss be soft beneath your feet, the fire warm against your cheeks, and the love, mad, messy, unearned, rise like mist from the heather.
See you on the other side, wild one!
Way to be 😁 And the older I get the more my heart can encompass in love. In the end, it is all that matters.
Love will see us through
Love is a biochemical response; it's chemistry. But we don't conceptualize it that way, and to suggest to a random person, for example, that they love their spouse or child due to a chemical reaction in the brain would surely offend them most of the time, even though it's true.
There's clearly a reason for that; maybe an adaptive one. Maybe it's because love can't endure rational calculus because 1) we're not all that capable of it and 2) rational calculation is more likely to leave you terrified and shivering in the corner than motivated, by love or otherwise, to act; to fight back; to endure; and to just enjoy the little moments of connection.
It's therefore absurd to treat relationships as some sort of cost-benefit analysis; to circumvent 200,000 years of instincts to perform something that merely resembles rationality; and to allow metrics both to diminish the incalculable and intangible aspects of human relationships, and to render us shivering in that corner, alone and terrified, because our relationship didn't fill out some random checklist written by someone monetizing cynicism to pay for their third divorce.
Stunning, Tamara. Don't confuse my analysis for engagement-farming or fulfilling some mutually beneficial obligation; I comment because I want to.
What a magnificent takedown of the rationalist delusion. I felt the applause rising somewhere near my hypothalamus.
Yes, biochemically, love may begin as a cascade of neurotransmitters. But to flatten it to that is like saying a symphony is just vibrating air. Technically true. Profoundly false. The human need to transcend our chemistry is perhaps the most human instinct of all.
And you’re right, the cost-benefit model not only misunderstands love, it actively sabotages it. It replaces awe with audit. But love is not a management consultancy. It does not exist to optimise your nervous system. It exists to ignite it.
Your point about fear is especially important. If we try to think our way into safety, we lose the very courage that love demands. Because love is not safe. But it is sane, in the oldest, wildest sense of sanity: a return to instinct, to presence, to the unbearable beauty of irrational connection.
I’ll also take your final line as high praise. No metrics required, Andrew! Not between us!
Lately I’ve sensed that your essays are chronicling my own katabasis into deeper dimensions of love. How wonderfully strange to be witnessed by a writer I’ve never met. And to know that the shape of our longing, the intricacy of the heart, is shared. Thank you for your fidelity to the subtleties of the soul.
What a gift of a comment, thank you for meeting me in the underworld with your lantern lit, Tyler!
Katabasis is the perfect word. This descent, not into despair, but into depth, where love stops being a story we perform and becomes something carved into bone. It’s where the glitter burns off, and what’s left is raw, trembling, sacred. And yes, strangely shared.
If my words have mirrored your passage, it’s because we’re walking ancient terrain. The terrain where longing is not shameful, but mythic, where solitude becomes communion, where the fidelity isn’t to outcome, but to truth.
So I’ll keep writing from the shadows if you keep reading from the fire. We’re not alone down here. And that changes everything!
Tamara, this is staggering in both form and force—essay, manifesto, scalpel no less. You’ve named what our culture has forgotten: that love, in its raw, declarative state, is not a transaction but an existential posture.
What you’ve written isn’t just emotionally brave, it’s intellectually defiant. Your metaphor of love as heresy in a forensic culture is brilliant, and here’s a nuance I would like to add: just as belief without proof is often scorned in an age of scientism, love without reciprocity is now seen as a glitch, not a grace. We've collapsed affect into economics—every feeling needs a receipt.
There’s also a neurobiological angle here worth surfacing, we’ve become addicted to reward prediction, dopamine spikes only when validation confirms expectation. But love that exists without expectation breaks this loop. It doesn’t reward the self in the usual ways, but rather enlarges it. It’s not optimization; it’s overflow.
And maybe that’s your point? in a scarcity-primed, metric-saturated world, unconditional love is not sentimental—it’s subversive. You’re reclaiming it as independent action. And that’s not madness. It’s mastery.
Your comment, Alexander, reflects back understanding and amplifies the entire scaffolding of my essay. Thank you for this amazing articulation!
Yes, exactly, we’ve pathologised grace. Love without return is now seen not as rarefied strength, but as emotional miscalculation. Just as belief without proof is dismissed as superstition in a world drunk on empiricism, love without ROI is written off as weakness, or worse, as a lack of self-respect. But maybe the real self-respect is refusing to let your heart be domesticated by demand curves?
And the neurobiological nuance you’ve added is essential because we’ve hacked our emotional circuitry with validation loops, trained the self to chase only what delivers a dopamine hit. But love that exists beyond feedback, that doesn’t spike or crash with response, it moves us from circuitry to soul. From reaction to revelation. As you so brilliantly put it, not optimisation, but overflow. Not conditioning, but creative expansion.
And that’s exactly the point, to love unconditionally in a world trained for transaction is not regression but a form of revolt. It’s a refusal to live small. A heresy, indeed… but the kind that births new truths.
Thank you for meeting it with such intellectual fire and emotional fluency!
Wonderful.
This moved through me like scripture. Not because it comforted me but because it unnerved something honest in me that I’d quietly exiled. You unmasked love. Stripped of its performance, its metrics, its Instagrammed martyrdom. What you’ve framed here is an act of reclamation, emotional independence in a world obsessed with ROI. And you did it with such incredible precision and poetic brutality, I felt seen in places I forgot I had.
Your articulation of love as defiant presence, not contingent privilege, is one of the most spiritually radical things I’ve read in years. It reminded me that sometimes, choosing to love anyway is an act of self respect. Thank you, Tamara, for refusing the algorithmic flattening of feeling. This is beautiful, and it’s dangerous in the best way.
This might be the most exquisitely dangerous compliment I’ve ever received. Thank you, Céline! Truly.
Ye, what you’ve named so powerfully is the core heresy: that love, unperformed, unmonetised, unhinged from worthiness, is not weakness anymore, it’s a form of independence. To love without needing a spreadsheet to prove its value is, in this world, nearly criminal. And yet… it is also the last true freedom.
I’m moved that it unnerved something in you. That’s the feeling I trust the most, when a truth rattles. Love was never meant to be a performance review. And reclaiming it as self-respect (as spiritual defiance) that’s the revolution hiding in plain sight.
Here’s to the unflattened. The unfiltered. The unrepentantly tender. May we love dangerously… and live to tell it.
We need a salon littéraire with you, where we can gather, sip champagne, eat your favorite cake and talk about life.
Hmmmm quel rêve! J’aimerais bien.
I was just thinking about this while reading through the comments!!! Tamara, we absolutely need this :)
Hmmm….. I feel the pressure :)
I adore this one. What I feel when I read this is permission -- because at some point, we become adults too wrapped up in "what's best," & how to avoid the heartache of loving without being loved in return, & the endless loop of attempting to intellectualize what we were made to *feel* -- rather than humans with ravenous hearts that love, just to love. That want & long & ache to pour that love out, without needing it to make any sense. xx
Yes, exactly…. somewhere along the line, we traded in our instinct to love wildly for a spreadsheet titled “Emotional Risk Management”. And the irony? It didn’t save us from heartache…. it just made the heartache quieter, duller, more internalised.
But you’re right, we weren’t built for emotional restraint; we were built to overflow. Permission is the perfect word here. Not permission to be reckless but to be real. To long without apology. To ache without analysis. To love, not like an algorithm seeking a match, but like a fire seeking oxygen.
You don’t have to justify a ravenous heart. It’s not a design flaw. It’s your divinity showing.
Thank you, Amanda!
Thanks, Tamara, for writing to what the soul longs to express without limitations, without exception, without explanation. This sacred fount is so deep and ready to quench the thirst of our longings. May we not be distracted by the superficial, the "comfortably numb" existence of the "cultured". May our hearts be uncontrollably wildly in love...
Amen to every word, this is the benediction I didn’t know I needed.
Naming that thirst is somehow holly, the one not satisfied by curated lives or intellectualised feelings, but only by the unruly flood of soul-deep connection. The kind that doesn’t ask for permission, that overflows polite teacups and ruins the linen with its aliveness.
And yes, may we stay wild. May our hearts refuse to be domesticated by irony, or numbed by “nuance”. Let others sip from shallow pools of cleverness… we will drink from the fount that tastes like longing, like risk, like love unabridged on the other hand.
No explanations. No exceptions. Just the sacred chaos of feeling fully.
Thank you, Dan!
Your words touched me. What a sad world we live in where we need to justify the love that we feel.
I too love people who I am told do not deserve it, with whom my contact is infrequent and guarded. I love them because I loved them once and love is like energy - it cannot be destroyed, only transmuted. So I love those people in a form that is outside of the rhetoric of love languages, which assumes that love is something that is always expressive and engaged. Love can forever and enduring, while we keep our distance, while we wish them the best life has to offer, while we choose to remain out of their lives.
Yes, yes, yes to all of this. What you describe is a love that has graduated from performance. A love that doesn’t need to be visible to be real. It’s not the kind that shows up in anniversary posts or matching sweaters but the kind that sits quietly in the soul like a candle in a room no one enters anymore, still lit.
You have named something powerful: that love endures not because it is expressed, but because it exists. And you’re right, the modern rhetoric of love languages, as helpful as it can be, often reduces love to something transactional, observable, and affirming. But some love is spectral. Some love is lunar. It exists at a distance, and yet it shapes our tides.
To love someone silently, distantly, without demand or reward, is a kind of grace our culture doesn’t know what to do with. But it is no less sacred. In fact, maybe it’s the most sacred because it asks for nothing but to remain true to its own origin.
Oh. Yes, this was certainly worth the bated breath. You are far from a fool, and no, you are definitely not a coward, not with your unlicensed heart. My head is beginning to ache with the unshed tears, you have opened so many doors, so many memories, so damn much love.
“…what about the silent courage of loving anyway?” This could have been written about Shakespeare’s Viola - the only character that makes me wish I could act. I understand her from the inside out - there was no lack of courage. She didn’t tell her love because he was already in love with someone else. Instead she tried to help him woo his lady.
Okay, I didn’t go that far. But the first time I fell in love I had no blueprint to follow, no idea what to do, and when I realized she was already in a relationship, well, hell. There was no choice. I grew up on King Arthur, Robin Hood, and even as a child had a well-developed sense of honour (though my sister will tell you it was a little warped at times). I kept my feelings to myself and took a lot of grief later when I shared that with one or two friends. They couldn’t believe I wouldn’t speak up; the notion of staying silent, being honourable and loving in silence, made no sense to them. Eventually I did express my love in a book that was something of a very late love letter. She died before it was completed, and I don’t know if I’d have had the courage to share it with her. I’d like to think so, because it was more of a thank you than anything.
“This love is not meek or martyred - it’s mutinous…It loves in spite of being told it shouldn’t.” Years later, I was told I couldn’t be with someone, because she wasn’t emotionally able to love me. Intellectually I understood why they said it and why it was true in a way (trauma-related). At the same time, I was there and they weren’t. I looked into her eyes and they didn’t. I knew what I saw, however fleeting. And I also backed away, because the best chance she had of healing was if I did, for reasons that had nothing to do with me. It fucking broke me. Like nothing else in my life. And thankfully she did heal, but the same people kept insisting it was never real. It was years before I stopped loving her. Not because I expected a different outcome. Just - because.
“It means understanding love…as…something you want to give because you want to live in a state of generosity rather than scarcity.” Now that was a very different kind of love. I was the head cook in a community and people in that position were usually one of two kinds: coming from scarcity or coming from generosity. I followed in the footsteps of my teacher whole heartedly in the generosity mode. I made a sign with a quote from her - “The Kitchen is a Place of Love” and hung it in my office. When I found people stealing, and they did, I let them know they had my permission to take what they needed, just to let me know so I could make sure we didn’t unexpectedly run out. And I did ask the person who stole cookies not to take the ones marked for meetings, but that I’d make sure there were always others he could take. I never understood the stingy ones. Our job was to nourish a community, and that is a job of love.
There were other words in this essay and your replies to comments that applied to all of these, and took me to some unexpected places.
“…we’re walking ancient terrain, the terrain where longing is not shameful, but mythic, where solitude becomes communion, where the fidelity isn’t to outcome, but to truth.”
“ferocious in devotion”
“…to be a person who choses to love because that is the orientation of their soul…”
“…the realm of the spiritually untameable.”
“…to love is not a response, but an identity…”
“…to love is not a response, but an identity…” Yeah, that one made me shed a few tears. All I could think was, “My ‘why?’” I’ll need some more time with that.
You did, by the way, make me laugh out loud - “DMV of Decorum” - :)
But I did not laugh at your manifesto. I repeat, you are not a fool. And you have the courage of ten thousand heroes (and heroines).
What an exquisite, soul-laid-bare gift, thank you for sharing this heartbreak-laced history, this lived love-letter to dignity, restraint, and the unclaimed spaces where the fiercest kind of love often takes root!
Your story reads like something written in the margins of epic myths, where the real valour isn’t in conquest, but in containment. In loving quietly, ethically, without demand or detonation. Viola is the perfect parallel, her silence was structure, not submission. A scaffolding built to hold a love that would never be housed in return. And like you, she never stopped being true. Not to an outcome. But to herself.
Your kitchen, that was a temple. Not the stingy kind where love is measured in ladles, but the kind where generosity is philosophy. Love without evidence doesn’t always come in the form of longing glances and Shakespearean ache. Sometimes it looks like letting someone steal cookies with dignity. That is spiritual musculature.
And yes, “to love is not a response, but an identity”. That line hit me, too, when I wrote it. It came out like an arrow, and I wasn’t entirely sure where it had flown until I saw it land in others. Like it did in you. We often think love must be earned, provoked, reciprocated. But some of us love because it’s simply who we are, like having green eyes or a limp in the soul.
Your grief, your mutiny, your laughter at the DMV of Decorum (because we all need that, too), they’re all part of the same fire. You have not wasted your love. You have witnessed with it. And when everyone is obsessed with winning, that might be the most heroic thing of all.
Ten thousand thanks for seeing me! I see you, too.
It’s no coincidence that the teacher on the sign in my kitchen, who taught my teacher kitchen practice, was also the founder of Zen Hospice - his generosity found many outlets.
One correction in what I wrote. I said it took years to stop loving the woman I had to back away from, but I never stopped loving her, the love transformed into a love that could be okay letting go of the hope it would turn out different.
Can you say more about “a limp in the soul?” The phrase kind of tugs at my heart.
I actually like that you didn’t stop loving her, but that the love transformed, yes, that’s precisely the kind of love my essay hopes to dignify. Not the love that clings to an outcome, but the one that releases the storyline while keeping the soul-thread intact. A love that lets go without erasing.
As for “a limp in the soul”… it’s the phrase that came to me when I tried to describe what it feels like to be shaped by love that was real, but perhaps incomplete, or unreciprocated, or impossible. It’s not quite a wound anymore, but it’s also not nothing. It’s the spiritual echo of having walked too long with your heart leaning in one direction. A kind of tenderness that doesn’t fully go away. You move forward. You live. You love again. But there’s always a slight tilt, a softness, a memory in your gait because some loves alter the way you walk through the world, even after you have learned to walk on.
It’s not damage… It’s evidence. And in its own way, it’s grace.
This made me weep. You have a way of capturing and expressing things I don’t fully understand myself until I read your words. “…some loves alter the way you walk through the world, even after you have learned to walk on.”
Writing with my soul, after having lived it……
deep gratitude…
“So here is my heresy, my confession, my warning shot and benediction: I will love you without your permission. I will love you before you prove yourself. I will love you and I may still leave. But I will not be edited by your readiness or reshaped by your refusal. I will not wait for you to earn something I am already overflowing with. Love without evidence is not a flaw. It is not a pathology. It is a choice – the only one I know how to make that makes me feel like I am not wasting this life. And maybe I will be called a fool. Maybe I am one. But at least I am not a coward. And that, for me, is enough.”
The soul of Emmanuel Levinas is here…
What a beautiful invocation, yes, Levinas is here, pulsing in the margins. That radical ethics of the face. That insistence that the Other is not an object to be earned or justified, but a presence that demands responsibility before reciprocity.
To love before proof, to respond before permission… that’s Levinasian to the core. Not because it’s sentimental, but because it’s ethical. You don’t love someone because they check the boxes. You love because, in their face (in their sheer, irreducible existence) you encounter the impossible demand to respond with yourself.
And maybe that’s the fiercest kind of love: not one that waits for the rules, but one that answers before the question is even formed. Not cowardice. Not foolishness. But the deepest, most human courage of all.
I find myself wondering why all this feeling talk is directed only towards other two footers and not say, our four footers, or a standing person, a sacred tree, or mountain daimon person, or a God person, or an all consuming art piece for which one pours all their love for its expression, like a Michelangelo's David. Or people's hobbies for which they fully invest themselves into, and for what? I've given myself to projects like you have given your love to other people, and it carries the same gravitas without any metrics of return on the investment of one's energy. I've watched a building be excavated for which I poured so many hours making something work and that took a bricolage of magic to render. Or other projects which I've had to walk away from after the hard work to fully manifest a vision. I've earned nothing from any of this, yet there is the sense that, like the property I'm at now, the presence I've brought to the place speaks of a spirit moving within me, and gives life back through one's own witness, in this ephemeral flowing now, of a beauty born from the wilderness of the given. Or like "the love of place, that grows into the body", our loves are not just for humans but, whatever makes us present to ourselves is the metric, the evidence, the proof in the pudding that our love was not in vain, however it is received, because it became us. The man who became a mountain, like Thoreau's Walden Pond, our loves grow us by bearing witness to our presence.
This is the deeper current beneath the whole essay, and you’ve caught it in your bare hands.
What you’re naming is love as devotion, not confined to romance, or even people, but to presence. To place, to art, to the invisible architectures we build with our spirit, our hours, our breath. A love not tethered to the relational, but to the relationality of being itself.
You’re right, of course, we have made the mistake of narrowing love talk to the domain of the interpersonal, as though only human-to-human connection were worthy of our full surrender. But what about the tree you pass daily and nod to like an old friend? What about the house you’ve painted, repainted, filled with light? What about the field you walked into and suddenly remembered who you were?
To love something, be it a person, a project, a godform, or a half-finished sculpture no one else will ever see, is to inhabit it with your being. The act of loving becomes indistinguishable from the act of becoming. And that’s the point, isn’t it? Not what you get, but what you grow into.
“The wilderness of the given”. Yes. That. The love that arises not from desire or need, but from the sheer astonishment of existing alongside something else with reverence. Whether it’s Michelangelo’s David or a foundation you laid by hand, it doesn’t matter. The love made it real. Not the outcome. The witnessing.
And so yes again, love without evidence is never in vain. Because the proof isn’t in who or what returns it. The proof is in who you became while offering it. The mountain doesn’t say thank you. It just becomes part of your bones.
Thank you!
Ah, Levy-Brule's participation mystique when subject-object blur the boundaries in a shared identity, Alfred Schutz calls the pure-we and Buber the I-Thou, where I am no longer an isolate but enter into a symbiosis with an other person, project, godform, objet d'art, in a living process that becomes the horizon of ones being. Connection is the key for our identity to grow, to participate in "the relationality of being itself", in dreams as well in the waking world. Ours is a Shakespearian cosmos in which our language furnishes the eidos with which to see the play we're in, as we enact our role. Be it Love's Labors Lost or Romeo and Juliet, the whole worlds' a play, or even a dream within a dream from which like history we strive to awaken from, like "the field you walked into and suddenly remembered who you are" in the dream we can become conscious that it is a dream and your body is sleeping in its bed. So love as devotion is about our identity becoming present to the psychical "relationality of being itself", in the field of primordial reality, remembering the given breadth of here and the animating breath of now on a wandering planet whose sole purpose is our presence, sub specie aeternitatis. Thank you for this dance, Tamara!
It was my pleasure! Looking forward to the next dance.
Thank you.
When I truly create it is always an act of surrender.
Same with me.
When the spirit moves through one in prolonged act of creation, I become that process, there is no surrender per se; yes one could be doing something other I suppose, but giving presence to what is moving from within you is uppermost and much greater than elsewise living ones everyday. The small self surrendering to ones larger self? Or is there another way to say it: I've been abducted by aliens, or the muse had her way with me, or I was inspired, or letting go into the unknown I came upon a "road less traveled" and voila, this piece de resistance? Surrender like a mother birthing her baby, well yes, but the life is the driving force, and of course, the love. I'm not relinquishing anything rather one is grabbing hold of a mystery that wants your eyes to see and become present for it, the baby of our creation. You could say no, abort, and go another way, stay in ones small self and live from there. I just don't see the notion of "surrender" doing justice to the motivation inherent in creating something out of the blue, do you?
I agree with all your great descriptions. For me there is an “allowing”, making space for the energies you describe, that can only be possible in a “letting go”.
Hard to put words to it… a courageous or insane step into “undiscovered country”.
Or maybe the way Rumi describes becoming/ allowing to become a slave.
The simplest answer may be that early on my “creativity” was a threat to others.
Maybe its an impetus from necessity, when my will is infused by something greater and "it" takes one into that "undiscovered country" that wasn't on the radar before, and from which I become more of who I really am, more of my totality. In other words a creative endeavor is something I have to do or my life is not worth living; like a stage of life one has to go through to in order to answer the call, to fulfill the quest that brought one here in the first place.
A rich and passionate reply, and I like that we’re circling the same mystery from different altitudes. We may be using different metaphors, but I believe we’re speaking to the same interior flame.
When I say surrender, I don’t mean passivity, nor abdication of will or vision. I mean the precise moment when the ego (sharp-edged, controlling, time-bound) releases its grip just enough for something deeper, stranger, wilder to slip through. It’s not the absence of action, it’s the suspension of authorship. Not “I relinquish”, but “I yield to what’s larger than me, and let it move through my hands”.
Yes, perhaps I could be doing something else, but I’m not. Not because I forced it, but because I allowed myself to be taken. Not unlike your alien abduction metaphor (which I like) except that the ship is coming from within. And while I appreciate your phrase “grabbing hold of a mystery”, I would say for me it’s more that the mystery grabs hold of me. The act of writing, or painting, or birthing something from silence, often feels less like I’m driving and more like I’m being driven by something I can’t name, only honour.
The mother-birthing metaphor you mentioned is, to me, actually the most aligned with my version of surrender. It’s not that she isn’t active, she is profoundly present, but she must let the body do what the body knows. There’s pain, there’s effort, there’s breathing and choice but there’s also trust. Trust in the thing that’s trying to be born.
So no, we’re not so different. I’m not saying surrender means letting go of agency. I’m saying it means letting go of domination. Of insisting on form before the spirit has arrived. And maybe, sometimes, the greatest creative power is in precisely that: the willingness to be moved.
I liked your reflection. Thank you!
now, that's something i can say i agree with! in gratitude i'll send you an unfinished, unpolished poem i've been writing on since a few weeks already, on and off. it's not done, it's not good, it's just a little poem:
your world
my wild
your true
my love
your no
my even so
What a small, perfect tremor of a poem. Unfinished? Maybe. But it’s already whole in the way that a heartbeat is whole… brief, unedited, undeniable.
Its structure is very tender… your no / my even so. That’s the whole theology of unconditional love in four words. Not resignation, but reverence. A devotion that doesn’t flinch at refusal, but meets it with presence.
Don’t rush to polish it, please! Some poems are meant to stay a little raw, like skin still remembering touch. Thank you for sharing this fragment, Ivy, it hums. I love it!
I love the idea of an unlicensed heart — some reckless soul who’s hot-wired their love for someone outside the bounds of polite society.
Yes! A heart that never went to DMV of decorum. That didn’t wait for emotional insurance before flooring it down the wrong side of affection.
An unlicensed heart is gloriously feral. It doesn’t signal, it doesn’t ask for clearance, and it sure as hell doesn’t parallel park its feelings to fit the occasion. It loves like it just broke out of the metaphorical institution, wild-eyed, windblown, grinning.
And maybe that’s what we need more of. Not love that plays by the rules, but love that rewrites them mid-sentence. That shows up barefoot to the black-tie event of your life and says, “I’m here anyway”.
It definitely redefines the modern version of love. I’m trying to think of people in my life that would fit this new iteration. There are a few!
Then you are lucky!
Oh Bliss unbounded! Another Tamara essay on our wayward souls. Printed off for later as WHY AM I AT MY PC when I could be in the Garden (of Eden). Though I was having a coffee post one hour of watering in our lovely … can it be?… summer!
Ohhhh, what a glorious image, you, coffee in hand, essay freshly printed, garden glistening like some half-repentant Eden. I almost want to rewrite the piece to include you as a character: the reader who pauses watering paradise just long enough to gather words like wildflowers and tuck them between the pages of her morning.
Honestly, what better way to read about reckless, unlicensed love than surrounded by the sensual excess of summer? I’m honoured to be joining you there in ink, if not in body.
Now go, back to the garden! That’s where the best heresies begin anyway.
Eventually he escapes the garden! But not for long; this being my morning deal with emails, dip into Substack then back into Paradise. Cooler this morning; will water the new plants and then the daily deadhead. For a Deadhead.
Then think - where can I plant the two funky Primrose my oldest son gave me, he rapidly becoming an excellent gardener himself.
Yes, what a splendid heresy that first garden gave us. And thanks as ever, Tamara, for an intriguing and illuminating essay. You have a special gift and the number of subscribers you have attest to that!
Have a great day
This sums up our pathology perfectly:
"We have forgotten how to feel for no reason."
Yes, and what a tragedy, really, that we now need reasons to feel, as if the heart were a courtroom and every emotion must submit evidence before being allowed to speak.
We have outsourced our instincts to algorithms, our affections to analytics. But feeling for no reason… that’s the original freedom. That’s the jazz of being alive. Children do it. Artists do it. Lovers in the rain do it. It’s not irrational, it’s human!!!
When we forget how to feel for no reason, we don’t become more mature. We become more marketable. And what a dull trade that is…. at least for me!
Your writing is stunning—clear-eyed and full of depth. There’s a kind of beauty in the way your insights unfold, like light catching on something that was always there, just waiting to be seen.
Thank you so much, Asacker, for these beautiful words!
This kind of love that does not expect any benefit or exchange of love for love takes a destructive form in societies surrounded by strict social customs and religious controls.
It turns into a delicious secret that lives with you every second, is present with you like a song, and makes everything around you a poem.
The most sadistic and self-defeating thing is to hide this love from the one you love, and to preserve it like a bottle of expensive perfume.
Yes, when the world is too rigid to hold that kind of love, it doesn’t disappear; it becomes art. A secret, yes, but not one of shame. A sacred one, like contraband joy smuggled past the border guards of propriety.
In societies where the expression of unreciprocated or “inappropriate” love is taboo, love doesn’t die… it shapeshifts. It becomes metaphor, music, metaphor again. It infiltrates daily life like scent on a scarf: invisible, undeniable, unshakable. You sip your tea, and there it is. You walk past a certain window, and it hums again.
And yes, what exquisite pain… to preserve it, unopened, like some divine contraband. But also, what power. To hold love not for transaction or performance, but for poetry. To let it perfume your life, not theirs. Maybe that’s the truest act of devotion? To love so deeply it writes you into a poem, even if they never read it.
Gossip is the most powerful killer of love.A lover who opens his ears to gossip is not trustworthy.