Love is Obvious
an ex-avoidant's exploration of love, in metaphors
Love is obvious. It is inevitable. It’s our default setting. It may catch you by surprise, hence, why we fall into it, but love is, inherently, an obvious thing. We are built for it.
How does love start? How does it grow? Where do the seeds of love get sown, and how do we find them again when it feels like love is playing an Olympian level game of hide and seek?
I used to think of love as a trap. Love was a well-laid snare that catches you when you’re least expecting it. I wasn’t searching for love as much as I was watching my back in case it snuck up on me. I was like a deer trotting through the forest; the subtle crunches of leaves under Cupid’s boots were my warning bells and fire alarms. When love and I finally collided, it was like a car barreling towards my little, metaphorical deer body. I caught sight of love’s bright headlights and immediately froze, confused as to whether this glowing, ethereal thing was going to spare my life, or strike me dead.
A friend recently described love to me as “the most obvious thing she’s ever done.”
It made me take pause.
There’s a John Mayer song that says love is a verb, and that James Baldwin quote that says “love is not a popular movement.” I believe that love is an anamorphic thing that breathes. Love is quiet. It is overwhelmingly, painstakingly, calm.
As someone who’s spent most of my life making haste, I have never understood this mysterious, aforementioned calm. If I’m scrambling to find love, wouldn’t it be hurriedly trying to pin me down, too? Is love not something we fight for, or with? Don’t we chase one another ‘round the backyard like we’re 5 years old at my grandmother’s house?
What I’ve learned this week, is we cannot be in a rush for love. Love does not rush, it refuses to. It does not flood us. It is not a natural disaster, waiting to sweep us down it’s powerful current.
Love’s current is our pulse. It is as natural as the day. It is a never ending sunrise, an eternal dawn that washes over us and asks us to sit with it.
The power is in the stillness.
Love is a cliff. It is a ridge near the ocean that the monks meditate on. The sea fowl need not flap their wings here, they simply extend their feathers and float upwards on love’s never ending tailwind.
The only thing opposite of love is not fear, it is not hate — it is apathy.
Apathy diminishes. It turns the saturation down on an extremely colorful existence. Apathy blows out the candles and flicks off the big light.
The birds cannot float on a current that does not exist. Love songs do not derive from a void of voices. Love is a mountaineer, and apathy’s vast plain of nothingness gives love no hills to die on.
We are built to join love in it’s trek across the world’s most spectacular peaks. The climb is steep. The views are unparalleled.
Maybe that’s why some people say love is a “fall,” because it takes us to such high altitudes.
Love is in the mountains. Love is a live, 80 piece orchestra, ripping through the theater on a Tuesday night. Love is an edelweiss flower that blooms in harsh and rugged terrain. Love is what lifts us, and asks us to come along for the ride.
Love is the soft underbelly of a rabbit, laying in a meadow. Love is the grandmother in Japan that invited me into her kitchen. Love is my friends. It is alive. It is everywhere, and something that’s everywhere is, inherently, obvious.
Love comes through my window every morning with the dawn. It rises first, well before me, but never forgets to shake me awake.
We greet each other with a familiar sense of hope and knowing in our eyes.
There is much to be done.
“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth”
James Baldwin
❤️❤️❤️
Something like love sounds so new in your words :) thanks for this Lexi