Chapter is: a main division of a book, typically with a number or title.

If I set out to write a book about love I would write a book about God and if I set out to write a book about God I would probably write a book about love. For me, they are infinitely and delightfully entwined. As you may have already guessed, love has been my earliest obsession. I grew up watching stories of love on screen, reading stories of love in the pages of my favourite books, and dreamily wondering what my love story would look like. I knew that love was often unrequited, and I developed an appetite for this tortured flavour of love; the longing and the yearning for a love that would never come.

I knew, as the stories told me, that love was the ultimate prize that the heroine could win. Love was the point of the quest, love was the goal, love was the aim and love was the trophy. Love was the beginning and the end. I longed for my love; the person that would make it all make sense, the person that things would just click with, and the person that would make me say “aaah, this is why it didn’t work out with the others.” In my late teens and early twenties, I jumped from relationship to relationship, tasting all the different flavours of love with all the people who I could fall into it with. When I realized that someone wasn’t my one true love; because they were too detached, too emotionally unavailable, too boring, too full of energy, too available, too much like me or too much unlike me, I would go through my favourite narrative arc: the breakup.

The breakup became somewhat of a ritual for me. I’ve become familiar with the strokes of its brush; the tortured, hot feeling of knowing that it needs to end, the big fight, the urgent attempts to repair because “it shouldn’t hurt this much, maybe they ARE my one true love”, the fractured attempts at repair and coming back together, the momentary peace, the gnawing feeling that this isn’t quite right, the big fight, the urgent attempts at repair again, and so the cycle goes. Sometimes, it was harder to get off the wheel than others. Sometimes we went around and around and around and around until either one of us got sick of it; sometimes my partner, because I have a big capacity for turmoil, and sometimes me when the turmoil just became too unbearable. I became familiar with this part of the drama too; my lover or I eventually saying “we can’t do this anymore” or some variation of the sort. 

“We can’t keep hurting each other in this way.”

When my partner was the one to deliver the line, I would feel unworthy and like I could just try harder to make it work, while simultaneously believing that their leaving was synonymous with their abandonment and rejection of me. I believed that I was just not good enough, and maybe if I had tried harder, or been a better and more loveable person, I wouldn’t have been abandoned. 

That’s when the next phase of the drama would begin. 

Not only would my conscious mind torture me with thoughts of my not enoughness, but my unconscious would torture me too. I would be plagued by nighttime dreams of my lover moving on, or falling madly in love with someone else, and saying to me “I’m just so much better off without you”. I would wake up sweating and teary and panicked, and then eventually rock myself back to sleep.

It wasn’t until I read all about love by mama hooks in 2018 and started studying attachment theory that I began to find language for this peculiar dance that I found myself in time and time again. I always wondered why relationships and their endings were so particularly torturous for me. The romantic movies I watched growing up glorified this; being bedridden or stuck on the couch for days, unable to shower, eat or sleep because we are so affected by the loss of our love. When I learned about attachment theory, and anxious attachment, suddenly so much in my life made sense. The challenge of breaking up, the endless fights I cooked up to feel closer to my partner, my addiction to conflict and the chemical hit that comes with resolving it and the fearfulness I would feel when a partner would turn away and not text me for some hours.

In college, when I didn’t hear from my girlfriend by 11am, I could be found lying in bed, sobbing and immobilised, convinced that it was over and that they were breaking up with me. My drama would be interrupted by a “morning babe, got caught up at work - hope you’re having a good day” text, which would abruptly end the dramatics and invite me to go about my day, until the next multiple hour gap where I could become convinced of a new story and return to my bed, sobbing and pre-empting all the sensations of “being abandoned again.”

As you may have guessed, yes, I do have daddy issues. I didn’t grow up with my father and I grew up in a single parent household, where my mother had multiple partners (not at the same time) and I knew as a child that relationships could begin and end, swiftly or over the course of some years, and that adults do often leave. My parents were divorced when I was three and my father moved back to the place of his birth which was a three hour drive away from my childhood home. From that age, I only saw him on infrequent occasions. 

I have come to repair my relationship with my father in recent years, and I still hold tender space for the ways that his abandonment and neglect impacted me as a child and continue to impact me until this day. A parent’s absence, whether physical, energetic or emotional, is a powerful thing. My earliest memories of my father were of inconsistency and promises made and not kept. Through our relationship, my nervous system began to simultaneously expect and fear this yearning for things and people who did not come and the disappointment that always ensued in their absence. This, coupled with the romantic fantasy, has made love a very painful and triggering place for me.

The chemical cocktail:

There is nothing quite like the boost that I get from new love. There is nothing quite like the high, dreamy feelings I feel the day after being with a lover, or the drop I feel when I no longer have access to that high; the hunger that I feel to have it again and the sheer desperation I embody as I will do anything to get it. I have been addicted to romantic love, and infatuation, for much of my life. I have had moments where alcohol, cannabis, tobacco, caffeine, psychedelics or social media have filled that void, but my longest standing addiction has been to love.

The shame researcher Brene Brown says we can hardly tell where shame begins and addiction ends. There is such a deep entanglement between the two, and it’s why sometimes I prefer to use the language of self soothing behaviours. All addictions are self soothing behaviours. They are our best attempt at relieving some underlying hurt or pain or trauma that we don’t have capacity (or the tools and skills) to be with fully and to metabolise.

When I took psilocybin mushrooms for the first time, I felt a love so big that it encased and moved beyond my physical body. I felt madly in love with everything, including my father and all the people that I had felt hurt or pained by in this lifetime. For the first time, I felt the essence of compassion and a love that moved me beyond and outside of my small self. And I was hooked. I kept trying to get back to that feeling, taking more and more until eventually I felt so crazy that I tried to kill myself and was sent to the psychiatric ward in a gurney. 

Even then, I remained curious, and as I spoke to the people in the ward with me I felt the deep throbbing longing for love within them. They told me stories of lovelessness, of being in prison, of watching their only companion in the whole world die and of being homeless for years without the tender care of human touch. I saw that the psychiatrists and psychologists had one solution for this lovelessness: pills. A new chemical cocktail to become addicted to. A benzodiazepine for the stress, a lamotrigine to sleep at night, and for whatever new symptom emerged - a pill would be found for it. However, no one sat down to ask them, for more than 15 to 30 minutes, about what pained them, or who hurt them, or how our society had failed them.

I ached and cried for these new friends, wishing that there was someone to bear witness to their suffering and wishing that there was someone to tend to their broken hearts. When I was discharged, I felt that I was abandoning them, but the pain of revisiting them and that experience felt like too much for me. One night I sat in the passenger seat of my mother’s rental car on the way back from the hospital and I began beating myself; hitting my head and fists and body against the dashboard and against the seat and door of the car. I dramatically opened the door as if to fling myself out it but my mother had already brought the car to a halt to avoid the damage.

This lovelessness I felt had turned into a deep, seething, almost unbearably consumptive rage. One night I was walking in Northampton, the queer little city not too far from my college campus. A white woman walked next to me, and I could have sworn she whispered: “get out.” I spent the next hour caught in a loop of rumination, unable to be with anything but my rage at this (real or imagined) slight. Maybe she did tell me to get out, and maybe that was my Holy Guardian Angel in disguise, and to that woman I can say thank you. I left the United States shortly thereafter, coming home to the land and the soil that had raised me. South Africa, a country fraught with its own struggles of lovelessness and trauma. I came back to the belly of the beast, to the place where it all began in order to meet myself.

When I started training as a somatic sex and relationship coach, I suddenly had tools for navigating what I was experiencing: trauma. This trauma was the charge, the electricity, that had never left my system. The charge of my father’s leaving, the charge of his trauma from being a freedom fighter in an Apartheid state, and the charge of my ancestors and their stories of heartbreak, suffering and grief from the violence of colonisation. My grandmother died of a broken heart shortly after her son, my uncle, was murdered. This was something that she never recovered from. My father lived with a broken heart, having lost his brother and his mother while still in exile from an unjust country and having to live with the grief of many of his dear, dear friends dying in a war of lovelessness and a fight for liberation.

What I have learned about love is: love is union, love is togetherness, love is connection and love brings us back into the whole. Apartheid, and similar systems of separation, alienation and oppression rooted in a myth of ‘otherness’ are loveless. My father was raised in a loveless system and my father was a lover. He devoted his life to justice, leaving his country at 17 to fight for independence and our people’s liberation, which is simply love by another name. I couldn’t understand my father’s abandonment of me and the true embodiment of his love until I could understand the ways that love had moved him towards this struggle and had shaped his life and his destiny in irrevocable ways.

For years, I sought remedies for this lovelessness and for the gaping hole in my heart waiting to be filled. I didn’t grow up in a religious household, but I found Wicca when I was 6 and loved the aesthetics of magick and spellcasting. I have always loved that which is controversial and taboo, and I loved teasing my mother’s Christian boyfriend who was convinced we were going to hell by doing naked rituals in the kitchen. My mother was spiritual, but found resonance across traditions, particularly within Buddhism. I grew up seeing the names of Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama on book shelves in my mother’s study. My mother was also a devotee of the lover Rumi. One day when we had a fight before school, I went to my backpack to find these words printed out on a white page, in bold: ”Raise your words, not your voice. It is rain that grows flowers, not thunder.”

My mother has always been a lover, too. Her religion is compassion. Growing up, engraved outside our front door was a poem that read: “When you stand outside my thatch hut, could you guess how spacious it is inside? There is a galaxy of worlds in here, and space for as much love as I can find.” 

My mother taught me that there is always more space for love, more space for care and tenderness. Her love was communicated through her politics, through the protests and marches and demonstrations and organizing that she devoted herself (and us) too. Some of my favourite childhood memories include my 12 year old self and all my dear friends sitting around the dining room table, listening to music and getting out big coloured papers and pens to make signs about justice and fairness and love for the protest we were attending the next day. There was a great degree of fun and delight in these rituals of ours and in this example of love in action and love made visible.

I followed in both of my parents’ activist and justice-seeking footsteps throughout high school and college. The more that I lived in the world and the more that I saw injustice and lovelessness, the more angry I became and the more that I felt I had to do something about it. In college, as a friend and I were organising for more diversity within the hires in our history department, I turned to them and said “we have to do it with Love, we cannot do this hatefully. Only love will sustain us.” Intuitively, for much of my life, I have understood that love is the way, the truth and the life.

As I began the journey of mending my broken heart, of re-membering my fragmented parts and seeking spiritual teachers who knew something about Love that I didn’t, I fell in love with the Buddha, with Jesus, with Venus and Babalon. I fell in love with these deities that hold a current of love that I aspire to. I fell in love with those teachers, those earthly embodiments of divinity, like bell hooks, and the Dalai Lama, and Thich Nhat Hanh, and Carolyn Lovewell, and my mentors Celeste Hirschman and Danielle Harel, who hold a deep current of lovefulness. 

They helped me to weave together the broken bits that I came to them with, kneeling before them with my hands open and tears and confusion in my eyes. It seems, in this world, my heart is always fragmenting, always being broken by the suffering that I witness and feel around me, becoming like sand on a beach - small and infinite - instead of sandstone - large and solid and stable. Through these teachers and their teachings, I learned that it was okay to have a heart like sand, a heart that, like the Hindu goddess Akilandeswari, is never not broken; a heart that fragments and fragments and fragments into eternity.

Maybe that is where God comes in. Maybe God is the heart that fractures again and again and again, forming infinite worlds and manifestations of Godself; being simultaneously infinite and fragmented and only ever the same thing that it was, and will always be. God’s fracturing heart forms worlds, art, human lives and dramas. God’s fracturing heart says “more, more, more.” God’s fracturing heart willingly breaks so that more beauty may emerge. It is in this differentiation that the artfulness and creativity of our world can exist at all, and it is in this ever fracturing heart that we may learn to be in relationship with each other. Seemingly disparate grains of sand learning to see the world, to see consciousness, from their limited perspective, while simultaneously holding that they are themselves something much bigger and greater. We are all the beach and the grain of sand and the other grains of sand around us. To be the sand, to recognise ourselves as God, we must recognise our place in the system and we must recognise our relationship to the All that we Are.

This is the single most important skill of our time; how to be in right relationship with one another without attacking or exiling or killing each other. As I write this chapter, there is a genocide happening in Gaza. As I write this chapter, Uyghers are being held and killed in concentration camps in China. As I write this chapter, millions of innocent humans are being displaced in the Congo in our hungry quest for mineral acquisition and are living under unspeakable circumstances and the constant threat of violence. As you read these words, countless humans have been raped, maimed, and killed by one another.

And, as you read these words, two humans are falling in love. A family celebrates the arrival of a long awaited child. Friends gather to play games and roll around in a field together. Humans, in the millions, say yes to the call of maat in their quest for more beauty, truth, and justice within our world. As you read these words, art that will change the world and human consciousness forever more is being created and dances of freedom are being danced and songs of joy and peace are being sung.

It is all happening, all together, and all at once. The beauty and the pain. The suffering and the compassion. God is not only beauty and those parts of this incarnate reality that we consciously like and approve of. God is paradox. God is the whole. It doesn’t matter what we call the All, or the One. Any word, any symbol, is an abstraction; it is a symbolic representation of the grand inconceivableness that we belong to and that we are. If we were to see it all we would become like glass exploding into fluttering little particles of sand; remembering how we had been put together, forged in fire to become individuated and seemingly separate. Our own piece of fine art. We would also remember how we are ultimately only ever those particles from where we came.

“Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law. Love is the law. Love under will.” These are the words of the controversial magickian Aleister Crowley, founder of the magickal current of Thelema, a Latin word meaning Will. I’ve often pondered this declaration. Love is the law. Love under will. Crowley was a great poet, and these words encapsulate the essence of his brilliance. Love under Will. All that is ever happening is Divine Will, meaning that God wills this all - us all - into existence. And because everything that is happening is Will / we have but one true choice as magickians, the choice to Love. To love all that God wills into being. All the suffering, all the pain and all the heartache. If this too is God, we must love it. We must love it because we ARE it, not because of some moral imperative or “should”. We must love it because to disapprove of it, or to refuse to see it as ourselves, is to create shadows; to become more alien to our own selves and to abandon who we are. My lovelessness led me to God. It led me to the beachy sand of my own existence. For this, I am grateful.

We need to learn how to love. We need to cultivate a relational intelligence that lets us be with this world, as it is - in all of its heartbreak and beauty - and lets us be with each other as we are. We need to cultivate this relational intelligence so that we may learn to reach out to one another and to build with one another instead of becoming increasingly alienated and at odds with one another. If we are going to navigate the tumultuousness of this time and use the chaos as a force that is generative, as powerful magickians can do, we will have to relearn the arts of love and unification. We will have to learn to preserve these arts and value them more than we value the art of division and shadow creation. All roads lead to love, eventually, but we may choose to walk more intentionally with and towards love in service of our heart’s deepest longing and the earth’s greatest dream.