We’ve all been here before, I know.

At least, if we haven’t, it’s unlikely we don’t know someone who has.

Misery.

But not the visceral, gut-wrenching, throat-crushing, i-don’t think-I-can-breathe type of misery.

Misery of the contained kind, the controlled kind, the i-don’t-think-i-can-let-it-all-in kind.

Misery of the just-another-beer-or-cigarette-and-I’ll-be-alright kind.

Yes, that kind of misery.

The misery of the every-day every-man, the misery of the broken-hearted, broken-willed, broke-down life.

This is the misery we really should dread, because it is the misery we use to convince ourselves that we are alive.

Except of course that we use it to keep ourselves from life.

It is here, on the edges of insanity, that Love comes and claims us for her own.

Five hundred years before me, Rumi beckoned his followers to “ask for madness in Love”.

It’s an odd exhortation – after all, surely what we all want in a seemingly increasingly turbulent world is a measure of certainty and stability?

But I have never been able to resist the siren song of Love, and have found myself again and again broken apart on the stony shore of her temple.

Some would say that I am merely a bad sailor – and there is no doubt a measure of truth in this. Others, of a more romantic persuasion would admire my resolute stand for passionate, life-altering love in a world of designer emotion.

Personally, I see a measure of truth in both.

The real question, however, is what comes before, during and after the experience of love?

Yes. Love itself.

Not the love of perception. Not the love of two bodies, two minds, two hearts – one for the other. Love itself as unspoken devotion to Love, Love as unyielding, uncompromising, unending. Love as it has always been, before there was anyone here to see it, and anyone here to forget it.

Love itself requires no witness, and demands that the witness must perish for Love to be known in completeness.

This is the wedding I’ve been planning.

This is the family I’ve been praying for.

This is the love of my life, she who will never leave me, but who I must bow before and dance as she warmly invites me to my own execution.

Let me whet the stone with my tears as you sharpen the blade that pierces me with never ending sweetness.

This is my laughter.

This is my song.

This is the fullness of my heart, the blood that enlivens me, the tenderest kiss, the intoxicating knowing.

This is who I am.

Yes!

There is only one love.

We trick ourselves by telling ourselves there is more than this Love, but in Truth, there is only this.

We categorise it, classify it.

We analyse and dissect it.

Yet the categories and analyses, the dissertations and speeches we make about Love rarely seem to touch upon that which truly breaks our hearts.

How would it be if every day, Love shattered you?

How would it be if every day, Love mercilessly, but with the sublime gentleness of  a mother, broke your heart?

How would it be if every day you were rendered mute by the enormity of Love that surrounds and contains, nurtures and holds the space in which you find yourself in this moment right now?

How would that be?

It would be different, I imagine, to the way you are used to living.

It would be different, I imagine, to the way you are used to loving also.

It would be different to what we have come to expect of life, different to the expectations, that no matter how we might think we are bettering ourselves through, only serve to suck the very essence from this moment, dry up the spring and stop the tears in our eyes before they ever have the chance to spring forth and water the garden in which we are standing.

A mended heart is incapable of truly feeling; it needs to break over and again to let nourishment in.

Every time you fix yourself, you kill yourself.

God knows this, which is why she keeps breaking your heart.

You are so much more than this.

So much more than this life.

One day you will be gone, and what will this body, this mind, these thoughts and these achievements mean then?

Most of what you have accomplished will die when you die.

So why not die now?

Why not let yourself die in the arms of the Beloved?