on love & Structure

What if Love itself is a structure?

What if the shape of Love is a guide, a tool, and a teacher?

My co-worker, Niki, told me yesterday she believes that in life and in love there are seasons we grow together and seasons we grow apart. As I listened, my instinct in her words were not that the growing apart was a season of ending relationship, but rather an essential period of all loving relationships.

When we are loved in the fullness of our being, we are empowered in our authenticity, our unique abilities, and our personhood. Love requires a foundation of autonomy and agency, otherwise the relationship is one founded upon possession, coercion, and control.

The most dangerous idea birthed from colonisation, imperialism, and enslavement was that patriarchal, possessive “love” was civilised, superior, and in the best interest of its object of desire. Here, a relationship depends upon a power dynamic of the One with Personhood and the Target of Acquisition. In this context, “love” is the act of ownership: there is “the Owner” and “the Owned”. The Owner decides what is best for the Owned. The Owner is the “Top” of the food chain, the Most deserving, knowledgable, and therefore Most Human. I’ve spoken before about this by calling it the “Hierarchy of Humanity” (those who are human are at the top, those undeserving are inhuman and at the bottom). The Hierarchy of Humanity is dependent upon the bastardisation of love.

We see this colonial interpretation not only in compulsory monogamy (where a man “owns” his wife), but also in paternalism as political strategy (where an empire seeks to own what it perceives as less Human); in patriarchal family structures (where Father owns his daughters to be sold/bartered or where parents view their children as something to be owned and exploited for their labour/body); in toxic work cultures that model slavery systems (positions of power own and exploit their workers, often manipulating them through patronising, infantilising, or possessiveness); in dehumanising education practises (where educators prioritise punishment, abuse, or neglect in an effort to control or subjugate their students); in medical malpractice (where paternalist doctors deny the lived experience of their patients in an effort to assert authority and remove patient humanity); in how we engage harm, those who harm, and the victims of harm (the carceral system, the school to prison pipeline, the US military industrial complex. the exploitation of Veterans, the targeted propaganda to continue to oppress people who are impoverished); and most especially in our relationship to the Earth (the conquering of land, the fraught desires to use all of Earth’s resources only to colonise other planets to repeat the cycle, the belief we can own any and every thing at our disposal without considering the life of what we desire to own).

This seemingly exhaustive, and yet still limited, list of examples is not to highlight our current faults and submit to the despair of the world. Rather, it is to illuminate the salient thread that connects all the oppression and pain. white supremacy and its lineage of concepts is not one enormous, seemingly insolvable foe. In reality, the problems we face are simply a deeply connected system of organisms, a network that depends upon one single, misguided notion that one person (or entity) knows how best to love the thing in which it wants, regardless of how the loved thing feels.

In other words, it is an Ego based assumption of how to love. Though still a system rooted in loving, it is an early attempt this is not complex enough to grant freedom or agency to the loved or the lover himself. In this Egoic Love, neither gets the fruits of love and despite all efforts, no one is free.

Such a prison of love reminds me of my favourite story:

The Story of Lilith.

While some paint Lilith as a “demon” or the “Queen of Wickedness”, Lilith was the First Woman. She is also known as Adam’s first wife. Allow me to paraphrase the story for the sake of catching you up to speed.

Essentially, God created two equal people (Adam and Lilith) who lived freely in the Garden of Eden. Same rules you may have heard before apply—life is Paradise, stay away from that cool as fuck tree, love each other, and enjoy the abundance. But Adam and Lilith couldn’t get along, largely because they were eual and Adam was simply a bitch boy who couldn’t handle being partnered to a baddie. Being a fully realised and actualised person, Lilith asked God to free her. Of course, there was nowhere else to go—except Hell. Lilith decided she would rather live in a Hell of her own making than be in a prison with some fuck ass man.

She is known as the Queen of Hell because she is empowered and believes in her own autonomy, no matter the cost. She is villanised for embodying and embracing her desire, but also for alchemising what others would find damning into a space where she reigns supreme.

An incredibly dangerous woman to an Egoic framework indeed.

Now, piss baby that he was, Adam begs God not for another wife who could love him as his equal, but a wife he can own and control. God, being a comedian, said, “Aight, bet. You wanna learn how to love yourself so bad, lemme break off that which protects your heart and teach you how to truly love yourself.” And, of course, Adam’s quest to subjugate and control his lover only imprisoned and highlighted for himself how painful of a lover he truly was. In his effort to control Eve, he was essentially controlling himself. And his fraught desires still led his lover to be so sick of his bullshit, Eve decided she’d rather learn and experience the burden of Creation, to make her own world, than to be trapped for eternity. What is most beautiful here, though, is because Eve knew she is inexplicably tied to Adam regardless, she realised that she must integrate and invite him on her path. And in her creation of her new world, she learned from her husband’s first wife and engaged a kinship with Lilith as well.

As Eve (and Lilith) allowed herself space to grow apart from Adam, only to integrate him into her life as well, so too can we transform our current state of being into a new loving structure of creative autonomy. We can build a system based upon integration, self & community actualisation, forgiveness, compassion, collaboration, and creative purpose.

While exceedingly daunting to understand or work out as a whole, I find it best to look in the details: the small, cumulative actions that will guide us all towards exponential change. Exponents, when charted, may appear stagnant over time—until, suddenly, a rapid catalyst for grown appears. Our reclamation of an old framework for love has the same potential. And once the change occurs, may even appear new.

Imagine with me, as my guides have shown me, a DNA Helix. It of course in reality is exceptionally small, nut is the foundation for all of life itself. It is an interwoven vortex of connections and separations. Points meet together, only to expand outward, and then meet once again. A Helix is a perfect, Divine structure we can model for Love, in all its forms. Its vortex shape is even mirrored in how our heart beats and functions!

At times, we fall in love and deeply align so well, we must crash together. In other seasons, we need the space and time to expand and grow apart. In all seasons, we can remain connected, aligned, and empowered. From the outside, there is no difference between each part of the Helix, we just observe a strong, connected being that is effortlessly flexible, adaptive, regenerative, and timeless. Information reverberates across generations backwards and forwards through time. For the Helix, Creation, Time, and Love is an ever expanding loop that can connect with anyone or anything. But inside, we see the complexity and the individuality that makes a whole.

Imagine what our intimate relationships, partnerships, collaborations, communities, healthcare, governments, work places, and environments could look like if we replaced our current structures of oppression with a structure of a “Heal”-ix. Imagine if we shared this seed of creation with one another, as Eve did, and took on the joys and burdens of creating our own world, outside of this one. Imagine if we left no one truly behind.

My Dearest, Sweetest Loves, won’t you feast upon this apple with me?