“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

Masculine and feminine energies are coming into balance and harmonizing, which brings the whole world into balance. Amen.

When we can see and be seen, out in the open and not hiding anything, disarmed and trusting, we can come to a deeper love. Through this process though, the release of old unhealthy patterns release. Shadows emerge to be healed. Defenses come down so we can come more into our hearts. The subconscious may also present challenges from childhood patterns. If we can resist the urge to run, but if we choose to be even more present and mindful, our fears can fall away, allowing us to expand to where we can live a deeper, fuller life. Passion can drive us to seek resolution by healing ourselves, overcoming all barriers by which we are confronted. We do it because our relationship is worth it and when we rise, we rise together.

Sonnet

by CS Lewis

The stars come out; the fragrant shadows fall
About a dreaming garden still and sweet,
I hear the unseen bats above me bleat
Among the ghostly moths their hunting call,
And twinkling glow-worms all about me crawl.
Now for a chamber dim, a pillow meet
For slumbers deep as death, a faultless sheet,
Cool, white and smooth. So may I reach the hall
With poppies strewn where sleep that is so dear
With magic sponge can wipe away an hour
Or twelve and make them naught. Why not a year,
Why could a man not loiter in that bower
Until a thousand painless cycles wore,
And then—what if it held him evermore?

Here the Whole World

by CS Lewis

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hopes that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.