Love Is War

Some phrases stay with us because they capture something we’ve spent years trying to understand. Looking again, loving life, walking the walk, amplifying the light: each has marked a different stage of my journey. Now another has emerged. Amor bellum est. Love is war. Perhaps the greatest battles are those that bring us closer to truth, dismantle our illusions, and change everything we thought we knew.

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I’ve had a few signoffs over the years. Small expressions of something I was trying to understand, embody, or perhaps remind myself of along the way.

Look again.

A simple invitation to question what I think I see, to look beyond the obvious, the familiar, the carefully constructed stories and accepted interpretations, and recognize that how I see things isn’t necessarily how they are.

Then came Love your life. An invitation to embrace the whole experience, not just the agreeable parts. To stop waiting for circumstances to become more accommodating before allowing myself to live fully.

Then, Solvitur ambulando. It is solved by walking. Less contemplation for its own sake, more movement, experience, discovery, and the willingness to find answers along the way. Some things simply cannot be understood from a distance. We have to walk through them.

Not long ago, I adopted, or perhaps graduated to, Amplify the Light. The journey through dark subjects, concepts, and territories can be long, but exposing the shadow aspects of our humanity and earthbound experience is only part of it. What then? We have to bring light to what we uncover, amplify it, lean into lightness, and unburden ourselves of the programs and conditioning we’ve mistaken for who we are. The world, and its sociocultural expectations, may keep pulling us toward the negative and the dark. I see no reason to stay there.

And now, another phrase has been quietly taking shape.

Amor bellum est.

Love is war. It carries several meanings.

It’s not about the familiar battle between lovers, nor some romanticized struggle in which suffering is mistaken for devotion. It’s something much deeper.

Love, that inherent, intrinsic, indescribable energy at the heart of our realm, has a way of bringing everything to the surface, no matter who you are or what you may claim to know. It exposes our fears, attachments, expectations, defenses, contradictions, and carefully maintained storylines. It unsettles what we’ve grown comfortable with and normalized, challenges the identities we’ve constructed and the ideologies we’ve adopted, and sheds light on the places where we’ve mistaken control for security, possession for connection, and familiarity for love.

As I explored in The Idea of Love, recently revised for my second book, we often confuse love with our idea of love. We project our histories, unresolved hurts, and unmet expectations onto the people closest to us. We want them to behave as we prefer and somehow make us feel whole.

But love asks something altogether different. It asks us to see the other person, and ourselves, more honestly; to offer compassion without abandoning discernment, to allow without possessing, and to recognize that the most significant work happens within.

My relationship with truth follows much the same path. I have an enduring love for it, yet find myself in almost constant friction with the world as it presents itself to me. Its contradictions, distortions, absurdities, and comfortable illusions can be difficult to reconcile with what I experience, question, and intuit. I cannot simply accept something because it has been repeated often enough, institutionalized, or declared settled and unquestionable.

But this is not merely a war with the world. It is a war within, too. Truth demands that I turn the same scrutiny inward, challenge my own conclusions, relinquish cherished beliefs when necessary, and remain willing to discover that I was wrong. Otherwise, I’m simply defending another illusion.

Perhaps that’s the common thread running through all these signoffs and expressions. Ultimately, the journey is about allowing love and truth to dismantle whatever stands between me and a more genuine experience of being. Actual enlightenment, minus the marketing lingo.

So, Amor bellum est.

Love is war!

It’s not a war to be won, but one that keeps revealing what needs to change, what needs to fall away, and what remains when the fog lifts and the dust settles.

Perhaps this will one day be a fitting bookend to a long and winding journey. For now, it’s not the final word, but a recognition of the forces that have shaped it.

And the journey continues.