Can you let me love you as you are?

[Luna Arjuna]

Can you let me love you as you are?
All wide-eyed with wonder? Feral with possibility? Hungry with longing? You who are home to what is wild and divine. All the flavors of human. Can you let me love you in the moments of life that are both ordinary and divine? Through the seasons and cycles of the moon, reflected in both of our lives.

Can you let me love you as you are?
In this moment? In this breath? Simply because when love like this arrives, it is a gift, a moment to savor. It is the stuff of the cosmos and the spark that makes life possible.

Can you let me love you as you are?
I know this is no small thing to do. It requires a lion’s heart and bucketfuls of courage. It asks of you and I to be seen in all our humanity and brilliance, to meet naked and bare from the start. It requires the humble act of putting down stories and choosing presence. It calls on us to be rooted and fluid, bending yet holding the vastness of this experience. It is an act of learning to welcome and embrace the waves. Loving like this leaves no room to play safe or small. Loving like this can heal lifetimes and unlock an embodiment of love that truly could heal the whole world.

I can only love you like this if you’ll let me into the chambers of your heart. And love, I humanly want to know, can you love me in this way too?
Can we find ease and grace in this dance?
Can we call upon and conjure all the elements we need for this alchemy of love? I think we can.

My hope is that you’ll say yes.
Because the most radical and human thing we can do is to love.
To dance in the remembering, the reawakening, the returning to love,
again and again and again.

~ Caity Flanagan
Art by Tomasz Alen Kopera