Love without form

Learning about love without labels or boxes

As I often do for moons, I did a small ritual for last night's new moon in Virgo. This new moon is in my twelfth house of endings, healing, surrender, and the spiritual realm.

But whether I choose to filter through the lens of astrology, this chapter in my life is about completing cycles. My life has been making that clear.

For yesterday's new moon ritual, I felt called to have Walgreens print photos I've taken over this last year-plus of my life that has been beautiful and devastating and full. Photos of me with people I love and who love me.

Astrologically this makes sense. Virgo is an earthy sensual sign with a penchant for organization. That energy coupled with the 12th house of healing and endings? Yup. Physical photos.

That's big for me. And new.

I didn't grow up with a fondness for photos. When I was young, I hated having my picture taken. I hated it!

Maybe people who grew up in an environment that felt authentically loving enjoy family photos. I can imagine, but I don't know.

I'm recognizing, at what feels like the end of a cycle, that I've built a life full of love that I want to celebrate.

For the first time.

And following a time of grief in various forms — divorce, job loss, unexpected moves, and more — I feel like I've done it from the ground up.

I'm as proud of myself for this as anything I've ever done.

It wasn't obvious to me that was going to happen, or that it was what life would ask of me.

I found a paradigm of love without form that had been foreign to me. (Or maybe it found me, through one synchronous connection after another, because it was never my intention to go looking for it.)

I spent several years — thank you, therapy! — letting go of the codependent brand of love I learned when I was young.

Recently I've settled in to letting beautiful connections flow through me without needing them to stay, or requiring that they fit into traditional boxes of what love or friendships look like.

The love beyond label of Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms has been written about, and there are others, but as a human habit we tend to get attached to needing to understand love, or to be able to compare one love directly to another.

Perhaps this comes from insecurity. If you can put a label on a connection, or fit it into a familiar box, you can set expectations. Maybe then you won't be hurt or disappointed.

When you learn as a child that love is inconsistent or that it needs to be earned, it's understandable that you might want to try to control things in that way.

When you heal and surrender, yes, you open your tender heart to the possibility of heartbreak.

But you also know that you will be okay even if it doesn't go the way you hope it will.

When you can do that, you unlock an incredible amount of potential for love.

Building more trust within myself and learning to live with intention helped me get to a place where I could embody this.

I found that love can take more forms than I had been allowing myself to give or receive.

• Love is waking up to a half-dozen cat memes in my DMs.

• Love is talking excitedly about work even before the sun rises.

• Love is losing track of time on a long shared walk.

• Love is rubbing a cat’s fluffy belly. (Is it a trap? Let’s find out!)

• Love is cleaning up a cat's hairballs. (WHY ON THE RUG. WHY.)

• Love is celebrating and being celebrated.

• Love is a thoughtful card in the mail.

• Love is a deep conversation.

• Love is playing Mario Kart or Dungeons and Dragons or pub trivia or walking through a field of flowers or ...

The contrast between those last two was hard for me for a looooooong time.

It’s not that I didn’t like fun.

But I'm a Person with Big Feelings ™️ and I've been blessed with a few people in my life with whom I can go unimaginably deep.

Sometimes you cross paths with someone who makes you feel seen and loved in a way you hadn't experienced before. You share things you’ve never shared with anyone.

It is a magnificently beautiful thing. These people are the brightest beacons.

But if you have unhealed parts of yourself around love, it can cause complications. ¹

I held all connections to that standard. If I didn't feel that depth with someone, the connection felt inherently less valuable or less loving.

But as I’ve healed around this, and allowed all connections to find aligned space in my life — all loving in their own ways — my life has expanded miraculously.

It's funny. Sometimes I'll mention a friend in conversation, and the other person will ask about the nature of that friendship. And even though I'm a writer, I often have a hard time finding words for it.

That's the kind of love I want.

Love,
James

1. Another complication is that I wanted to fight for those connections to stay in the way I expected them to look, even if they were meant to transition into a different alignment or pass through and out of my life. This is a separate post.